







■# 








LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 

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Shelf XS5T4 



UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 




DOLS BY THE 










AND OTHER SERMONS 



BY y 

FRANK MONTROSE CLENDENIN 

RECTOR OF SAINT PETER'S PARISH 
WEST CHESTER 



Qeoopovvtoi ycareiSooXov ovdav tifv itoXiv 






V 



NEW YORK '/c?^(o ■/ 

JAMES POTT & CO., PUBLISHE~ ~ 
LONDON: JOSEPH MASTERS & CO 
1889 



*&%< 




Copyright, 1889, by 
FRANK MONTROSE CLENDENIN. 



TOjj Pretrial Ptmorits 

THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED 

TO THE 

MEMBERS OF THOSE PARISHES WHERE IT HAS BEEN 

THE AUTHOR'S PRIVILEGE TO MINISTER 



Contents. 



PAGE 

Idols by the Sea i 

Where is God, that I may find Him 15 

The Humanity of Christianity 31 

There is no Difference 43 

The Saviour from Sin 57 

Easter Day 69 

Immortality 89 

The Church of America 115 

The Message of the Church to Men of 

Wealth 137 

Music and Worship 161 

All Saints' Day 175 



Sirote kg ti>e g*a. 



$t tauQtyt tljem manp tbin00 bp parabU*.— S. Mark, 
iv. 2. 

Jpt0 flpirtt n>u0 fttrrrt in \)\m m\)tn lie 0an» tyc ritp 
full of ibolfl.— Acts of the Apostles, xvii. 16. 

ftbou 0ljalt tuorsljip tl;r forb ttjg ©oo, ano JJim onlp 
sljalt ttjau stmt. — S. Matthew, iv. io. 

" Great care must be taken, while we are endeavor- 
ing to destroy external idols, or those of vice in others, 
that we do not insensibly substitute ourselves in their 
place."— Quesnel. 



$irote fig tyt Sbm. 




Little children, keep yourselves from idols. 

— i S. John, v. 21. 

jlONG ago, in a distant country, dwelt 
a large, strange family. When some- 
thing of their history is told to-day, 
you will see why it happened that the warp 
and woof of their existence somehow went 
wrong, why the flying days tangled their 
work into angry knots, and then tore it to 
shreds and nothingness. 

The face of earth covered by this far-off 
country was in itself of little value ; the fam- 
ily thought it quite rich enough for every 
need, but in this they were mistaken — much 
of it was rough and rocky, the rest of it 
yielded only to hard and constant labor. 

The climate of the place, too, was often 
very trying to human happiness ; the weak- 
ening, withering heat was followed by dis- 
tressing damp, and that by bitter and 



Jbols bn tlje Sea. 



destroying cold. The entire family suffered 
often from sickness. No one was spared in 
this distribution of physical ailments. How- 
ever few or great the number of his years, 
however high or low his station in society, 
each man received his share and lot of 
human illness. Every type of disease was 
found in this strange family, everything from 
headache to heart-ache, from lethargy to 
leprosy. The headache was caused in some 
cases by the stomach being empty with hun- 
ger ; the body being surfeited with food 
caused it in others. In not a few cases it 
was caused by the pressure of a jewelled 
crown upon the temples. The leprosy also 
had different causes ; with some it was phy- 
sical filth, with others moral filth, with others 
contagion, and with not a few it was caused 
by general disreputableness. This strange 
family also had trouble in the disturbed rela- 
tions of its members. Instead of aiding each 
other, as children of a common father, they 
seemed often anxious to injure each other. 
They divided into sections and factions, and 
strove with might and main to supplant and 
destroy each other. In this kind of work 



Jfaols be tlje Qca. 5 

they succeeded very well : they filled the 
earth with cries and curses, with bloodshed 
and maledictions. This wholesale homicide 
they called war. It was murder, to be sure, 
just like any other murder, but the word 
"war" seemed to this family to mention 
something justifiable. Even in time of peace 
the members of this family were in constant 
discord. Face to face they spoke sweetly 
enough, but each behind the other's back 
they lied and slandered without mercy. Dis- 
honesty, profanity, impunity, and injustice 
reigned supreme ; brother strove against 
brother, while father hated both son and 
daughter. Outwardly, full often, all looked 
white and pure, but inwardly it was full of 
dead men's bones and all uncleanness. 

To such a family came one day the glad 
tidings that there was a fair and better country 
to which they might journey and buy with- 
out money and without price, a land of peace 
and plenteousness, a home eternal, where 
came no sorrow nor sickness nor death, and 
where God would keep all tears from their 
eyes. But the vast part of that family cared 
no more for that glad tidings than they did 



JRrols bj) t\)t Sea. 



for each other. Some said, The god to wor- 
ship and the end of life is the family to 
which we belong : let us make a god of that 
and worship it. It was hard work making 
even an idol god out of that family, because 
at its best it was a sad collection. But in 
one place they found a charitable hand, in 
another a kindly heart ; in a crowded city 
they found a benevolent face, and in a re- 
tired corner an humble body ; somewhere 
they got two feet willing to walk a little way 
for others, and by hook and crook they gath- 
ered something together ; but the god of the 
family did not have many worshippers, nor 
give much comfort to those in trouble. One 
part of the family felt that their branch was 
not rightly represented, while another ob- 
jected to the idol having a hand taken from 
a section of the family not of the same social 
status as themselves. Those who did wor- 
ship the idol, however, were very decided in 
their convictions and feeling that their family 
was the only people of all humanity worthy 
of consideration ; they named their religion, 
therefore, Humanitarianism. 

They set up their idol in a town by 



Jfcols bg tlje &ea. 



the sea, a town known for its culture and 
self-complacency ; but there one dark night 
some malecontents of the family came and 
knocked down the idol, and set up instead 
what they called the god of Ideas. It 
would have been very bad form to refer 
to the fact that this idol was one of their 
own ideas. This new denomination taught 
that in the universe there was nothing real 
and lasting but ideas. Of course it was 
no fault of theirs that this was also their 
own idea. All small things like hills and 
mountains and rivers, planets like Venus and 
Mars, Saturn and Jupiter, were not realities ; 
the constellations, the milky way itself was 
but a metaphysical mist. But ideas, meaning 
of course their own ideas, were real, and 
would command the worship of the family 
when the Pleiades and the North Star had 
been forgotten. 

The idol of Idealism lived its short day, 
and then its glory faded from it to give place 
to the teaching that primevally and continu- 
ally forevermore all things were gas ; the 
mighty trees, the solid rocks, and the body of 
man itself were but gas. From gas came all 



Jbols brj tl)e Sea. 



things, and unto gas must all things return 
again ; therefore, the family should worship 
gas unto the end. Transient and ephemeral, 
however, was the glory of the gas sect also ; 
like an effervescent star its light shone but 
for a little, and then faded from human 
sight, and instead the learned of the family 
set up the idol of the Unknowable. Feel- 
ing that it would give standing to their 
imaginings to shroud the same in cabalistic 
mystery, they called their religion by the 
Greek word Agnosticism, the religion which 
worships the unknown and the incomprehen- 
sible, which says that the only real lasting 
thing worth living for is the unknown, which 
teaches that the only absolutely knowable 
thing is what is totally and entirely and ever- 
lastingly unknowable. The logic of such a 
proposition can be seen at once by a mind 
even moderately insane. There is something 
attractive in the sublime presumption of a 
religious science which begins with a confes- 
sion of total human ignorance, and then pro- 
ceeds to make an assertion which implies the 
possession of universal knowledge. Not- 
withstanding the startling arrogance and 



Jbols bg tlje Sea. 9 

brilliant effrontery of Agnosticism, it some- 
how failed to become very popular, and it is 
not easy to say why it failed. Any new state- 
ment which denied the existence of every- 
thing that had been or ever could be, had, 
as a rule, been eagerly welcomed by this 
family which scorned the idea of thinking as 
any one else did ; and Agnosticism taught 
and thought as no man nor angel in heaven 
or hell ever thought. It struck from life 
hope and faith, and placed there instead awe 
and wonder, — awe solemn and lowering, and 
wonder the offspring of ignorance ; it laughed 
at the idea of immortality, said religion had 
nothing to do with morality ; it called Christ 
the " omniscient ignoramus of Galilee " and 
described the better country where they 
might go as "a packing-box paradise." It 
stood by the grave of the woman who had 
lost her only child, and said, " I bring you the 
comfort, that, as far as any one knows, this is 
the end of your child. It is not at all proba- 
ble that you or any one else will ever see him 
again, and if you did you would not know 
him. Do not mourn. A few years more of 
blissful dogmatic ignorance, and you yourself 



io Jfools be tlje Sea. 

will sink into that eternal unknowableness 
from which emanates daily the most marvel- 
lous supply of rampant conceit, blinding pre- 
judice, and unparalleled stupidity that the 
mind of a self-deified intellect has ever con- 
ceived." 

Strange to say, even this assurance did not 
assuage the woman's grief. Then arose all 
the Agnostic branch of the family, wherein 
were seen prominently Herbert Spencer, 
Richard Huxley, and Matthew Arnold, but 
the woman refused to be comforted. Then 
the Agnostic branch of that family did despise 
that woman, and did utterly let her alone. 

Were time to allow, we might narrate of 
many other idols that this strange family set 
up to worship and adore, but it would take 
many days, and fill many long sad books, if 
such a story were to be written. Let it suf- 
fice to say that while many continued to set 
up new idols, and to divide the family more 
and more with bitterness, narrowness, and 
hatred, let it suffice to say that others grew 
very tired and weary of all this strife and 
dissension. 

None of the many idols made their sick- 



Sfcols bg tlje Qea. 



ness and sorrow any easier to bear, nor did 
they lighten one straw's weight the burden of 
their anxiety and disappointment. The sick- 
ness of a troubled and remorseful heart 
grew day by day more painful ; somehow it 
seemed that their very joys were poisoned, 
and laughter, if heard at all, was forced and 
had an echo in its ring which furrowed the 
brow and shadowed the very soul itself. As 
the day darkened and the night approached, 
the memory of the message sent long since 
by the Great Good King came back again, — 
the memory and message of a better country 
to which they might journey and be at rest 
and peace. But even after all their humiliat- 
ing experiences and reverses, after all their 
failures and downfalls, they continued selfish, 
self-willed, and disobedient. " Why must we 
journey ? " said they. " Why does not the 
Great King come and carry us to his king- 
dom ? We hate," they said, "this rule and 
requisition that those who wish to journey to 
the better land must first wash and be clean 
before even starting. We hate the require- 
ment that we must believe in the Leader the 
Great King sent. We despise the command 



12 Ibols bj) tl)£ Sea. 

that we must live upon that sacred food and 
drink which the King alone can give. We 
do but laugh at the statement that we must 
go on that journey a united body. We pre- 
fer to go as we please, to separate where and 
when we may desire, to select our own leader, 
choose our own food, and take that road 
which seems best in our own eyes." In this 
broad, popular road went very many, — so 
many that the road grew crowded, the dust 
thickened, and thirst came on apace. Though 
the way was broad, it was walled with solid 
stone higher than the skies. More dense 
and angry grows the throng, complaint and 
denunciation of each leader rise in the air. 
Suddenly the crowd stops, wedged irrevocably 
by the vise of its own choosing: without leader, 
without food, without drink, and far as eter- 
nity from the better land of the Great King, 
they find when the night has come that the 
broad and popular way is the way which leads 
to destruction. Then in despair, in recrimi- 
nation, and in darkness unutterable fades 
from sight and memory every idol god and 
all they that worshipped them. 

" He that hath ears to hear let him hear." 



Jfccls b2 tlje %za. 13 

The companion picture to the one which 
has just been portrayed is in every way its 
perfect contrast. It is the story of men who 
choose the hard and narrow way ; cleansed 
with heavenly and consecrated waters and 
taught by the Eternal Mother, they began 
their journey, in favor with the Great King 
and under His almighty protection and guid- 
ance. The road was often rough and un- 
attractive, and sometimes cut their tired feet. 
Siren voices called to them at every by-road ; 
Pleasure spoke to them from the hills, and 
Passion from the rich and verdant valleys. 
But the Light of the Sun of righteousness 
guided them at day, and the Light of a sin- 
gle star at night. Sometimes clouds and 
darkness hid both star and sun, and they 
would have wandered, but that some one 
upheld them in whose name they did believe. 
The overwhelming powers of worldliness 
often brought them down upon their knees, 
and the wintry blasts of many awful sorrows 
often found them with bleeding faces upon 
the earth. In a dark and narrow pass the 
last great change came. In that narrow pass 
wild beasts and devils met them, but in the 



14 Jbois brj tt)e 0eo. 

mighty struggle the souls of the men escaped 
and passed to the Light above. In that light 
angels met them and led them to that better 
country, where the wicked cease from troub- 
ling, and the weary are at rest. 

In Light of the Beatific Vision, these souls 
continue on their journey through the heav- 
enly park of Paradise toward the palace of 
the King of kings. Many " faces loved long 
since and lost awhile " have they met again, 
and, together with all those who have de- 
parted in the True Faith, they journey to 
that delightsome country where sorrow never 
comes and where death is but the gate of 
Everlasting Life. 

"He that hath ears to hear, let him hear." 



" astyert is ©<rtr, tijat J mag finti 
Wtira." 



Jfi tlje jforb among us, or not ?— Ex. xvii. 

JHn bones arc smitten asunoer as tuitb a siooro, robile 
mi) enemies tbat trouble me cast me in tbe tcctb; munelp, 
loijilc tb,en ear) bailn unto me, TUljcre is noto tl?n <6ob ? 
— Ps. xlii. 12, 13. 

jfet not pour Ijeart be troubled, neither let it be afraio. 
— S. John, xiv. 27. 

£0, 3 am uiitt) nou alumn, eoen unto tb,e eno of tyt 
morlo. — S. Matthew, xxviii. 20. 



CHRISTMAS, 



" Wfym te ©olr, tf)at 5 mag finir 

The Word was made flesh and dwelt among us. 

— S. John, i. 14. 

sPrjPEAKING as men speak, nothing is 
rSry more contrary to human reason and 
!§M| experience than the mystery to-day 
declares, the mystery of the Incarnation, 
which, as you know, means God made man. 
It strains even the imagination to suppose 
God would limit and localize His eternal 
presence as the Incarnation did limit and 
localize Him. Had God risen from the 
depths of the sea, or had He from out the 
radiance of the setting sun first in human 
form looked upon His wandering world, it 
would have seemed more in harmony with 
His attributes. Had God come in His glory 
with all His angels with Him ; had He come 
2 



1 8 toljer* is (3oh, ttjat 3 man finb ^im. 

with the rolling suns for His chariot, with 
the light for His garment, with the white and 
milky stretch of the universe for His pageant, 
— it would have been in keeping with that 
royal and omnipotent Ruler who gives the red 
glare to the war star, who makes white the 
light of Sirius, and who pales to silver soft- 
ness the far distant Alcyone. This limita- 
tion in absolute weakness to the body of a 
poor and helpless girl, this being born in the 
place where only the humble cattle lived, is 
a fact, we say, that, according to our human 
idea of things, is in the highest degree im- 
probable. To be, to exist in human form, 
that alone is against every expectation of our 
minds ; to be born into a body that time and 
tide could wear out and fill with pain, into a 
body that men could curse and the mob cru- 
cify — no humanly conceived system would 
ever have dared thus strike against the face 
of all that human intellect felt was proper 
and appropriate to the advent of Almighty 
God. But there is doubtless some great 
lesson in this apparent contradiction. Let 
us try humbly to find it. 

Is not this the lesson ? That God's presence 



iDtjm is (Boh, ttjat 3 mas finb flint. 19 

is where He has declared It to be, and not 
where we think It ought to be ? That It is 
where God has thought wise to have It, and 
not always where we feel It is ? Those Jews 
of old had settled ideas where the Messiah 
ought to be born, when He must come, how 
He must come. In the Hebrew mind, to be 
born and to be worshipped in a stall where 
cattle lived and died, was the last thing on 
earth to be imagined, not to speak of being 
believed. The thought of such a humilia- 
tion, of such a lowering of the dignity of God, 
to a devout Jew was irreverent, abhorrent, 
terrible. The Hebrew people, as a nation, 
therefore, laughed at the story of Christ's 
birth, mocked His life, and crucified Him — 
mark you, crucified Him — for what seemed to 
them irreverence and blasphemy. " He came 
unto His own, and His own received Him 
not." And has it ever come to you, my 
hearers, to meditate how likely it is that you 
would have acted as the Jews of Jerusalem 
acted ? Has the thought ever come that we 
all stand in about the same relation and atti- 
tude toward the God-child as the Pharisees 
stood ? They were not bad, immoral people, 



20 totjare is (3ob 1 t^ctt 3 mag finb $im. 

those Pharisees ; they were not rash nor 
coarse nor irreverent, at least they did not 
mean to be. Rather, they were devout, reg- 
ular in their religious duties, and gave alms 
with no more publicity than many respect- 
able Church people do now. They were the 
conservative Church people of their time, 
religiously, violently, on principle, opposed to 
change of any kind, whether in manner or in 
morals, whether in rites or in ritual. They 
had but one fault, these Pharisees : that one 
fault led them into every other trouble and 
sin of their race and age. That fault was hold- 
ing arrogantly that God must come as they 
believed He ought to come, and that God 
would act and must act as they felt He would 
act. We have ventured the assertion that 
the times have not changed much in eighteen 
hundred years, and that men still make 
their own judgment, — whether that judgment 
comes from taste or inheritance it matters not, 
— men still make their own judgment the 
criterion of right and wrong. They make their 
own idea the criterion not only for man, but 
for God ; for they say that unless things are in 
this way or in that way, in my way or in my 



tttym is (3oh, tljat Jf mag finb l)im. 21 

father's way, I will not believe them. Yea, 
all else is irreverence and blasphemy. That 
is exactly what the Jews said and did. The 
birth, the life, and the teaching of the Man 
of Nazareth were opposed to every precon- 
ceived idea of what the Hebrew people felt 
ought to be. His Gospel went crashing 
through the customs and ritual of many gen- 
erations. The chief priests, therefore, cruci- 
fied the Child of Bethlehem because He was 
an innovator, and disturbed, by warnings and 
other novelties, the death-like peace of their 
conservatism and their so-called orthodoxy. 

You and I, perchance, have our ideas of 
the way and time Christ will come. All men 
have some idea of where God is to be found, 
most men have very decided ideas on this 
subject. If you were to go out into the 
world, and ask earnestly and honestly the 
question, " Where can I find God, for I need 
Him, and He has asked me to come to Him," 
many men would answer, " God is every- 
where ; " and so He is. The color in the 
flower, the white crest of the ocean's wave, 
the mountains that climb above the clouds, 
the stars that move toward eternity, the 



22 toljere is (Sob, ttjat J man finb Qitn. 

breath that comes and goes, and the heart 
that beats through day and night till life is 
done, tell me that God is everywhere ; but, in 
all reverence, that is not the God you want. 
The God that is everywhere lets one man 
starve, another man surfeit, the bad man 
prosper, the good man suffer ; the God that 
is everywhere allows the pestilence to devas- 
tate and the earthquake to swallow up, and 
the world, the flesh and the devil to triumph. 
Under the shelter of the teaching that the 
only God is the God found in the " every- 
where," John Stuart Mill sent forth on its 
mission of evil one of the most terrible ar- 
raignments of religion the world has ever 
read. The God that is everywhere is a 
grand idea, but is not a personal certainty in 
danger, nor a haven from the storm when 
comes the wreck of matter and the crash of 
worlds. 

You ask, therefore, again, " Where is God, 
that I may find Him ? " and many make 
this answer, " You will find Him in the heart 
of all true believers ; " and doubtless they are 
right, for it is written, " If I descend into 
hell, Thou art there." All honest men know 



totjere is (fool!, tijat % man finb 43)im. 23 

there is much of sham and shame in this talk 
about being true believers. We know, those 
of us who are honest, that human faith is 
largely that stuff of which dreams are made ; 
that which is strong in prosperity and weak 
in adversity ; that which, like the Apostles, 
runs away when the crisis comes, forsakes 
its God and is forsaken of God. If God 
is only in the heart of the true believer, I 
fear you will not find Him nor be found of 
Him. 

For the kind of God which dwells in the 
human heart, in that which is deceitful above 
all things and desperately wicked, is the God 
who makes each life a little court of justice, 
" himself the judge, himself the jury, him- 
self the prisoner at the bar ; " a God to con- 
demn and righteously bring to judgment, but 
a God which makes us cry for some other God, 
some almighty and most merciful Saviour who 
can say with eternal authority, " Thy sins are 
forgiven thee : go and sin no more." 

Therefore, you say again, " Where is such 
a God, that I may find Him ? " Give me 
something definite, something personal, or 
give me nothing, which is atheism. Do not 



24 toliere is (Sob, trjat 3 man fmb $im. 

lure on my tired body with that which is but 
the mirage of the desert ; do not lead my 
weary heart on to grasp at some Eurydice, 
which, fading into thin air, leaves but a ghost 
upon the eternal sky and pales my sick soul 
with mortal fear. Give me, I pray you, a real 
God, a present God, for I am weak, and the 
strife is fierce and the warfare long. Tell me 
where is God, for the crisis closes and the 
King of terrors comes — comes to conquer, 
unless I find the God who can overcome 
death. Once He lived upon the earth, and 
men came and worshipped Him, brought Him 
their offerings, and returned again refreshed 
and strengthened for the strife. When the 
sick came to that God, He healed them ; 
when the deaf came, He unstopped their ears ; 
when the blind came, He gave them sight ; 
when the hungry came, He fed them ; when 
the sinful came, He declared their forgive- 
ness ; when the dead lay silent at His feet, 
He broke their bonds of adamant and raised 
them into life again. All these came to an 
earthly, visible body, and this is the God the 
tired children of this world seek by day and 
night. Is He still upon the earth, and, if so, 



tXtyer* is (3ob, ttjat J ma^ finb §im. 25 

where can He be found ? " Let not your 
heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid." 
He is still upon the earth, and you will find 
Him where the shepherds found Him, where 
the wise men found Him, where the devils 
found Him, where the sinful and the sick, the 
dying and the dead, found Him, where you 
may find Him — 

IN HIS VISIBLE AND MATERIAL BODY. 

That is the message of Christmas, that 
God the invisible, became visible ; that 
God the unapproachable, became God the 
approachable. God in human form and 
shape, substance and subsistence, that is the 
glad tiding of the Festival of the Nativity. 
It is something very hard to believe. It is 
something so full of mystery, something so 
contradictory to all that is agreeable to 
human reason, that except we "become as 
little children " we will never believe it ; 
for that Body where, in the ages gone, dwelt 
the Son of God, the Saviour of the world, 
was a visible form like our own body. It 
was a Body whose vital existence depended 
upon the breathing of a woman. It was a 



26 tol)ere is <5ob, ttjat % mas finfc fitn. 

Body that felt the cold and grew tired with 
the heat. It was a Body that men could 
bruise with stones and which could be torn 
with a crown of thorns. It was a Body 
which was tempted by the devil and which 
was strengthened by the angels. It was a 
Body which was lacerated by nails and 
which was gashed with a soldier's spear. 
But it was a Body the Touch of which gave 
sight to the blind, the Voice of which de- 
clared the forgiveness of sin. To touch but 
the fringe of the garment which covered that 
Body, brought healing to the sick ; and to 
shake but a finger in scorn at that Body, was 
an irreverence and blasphemy to the presence 
of God. For that Body which a woman bore 
in her arms, which bowed Its head and was 
baptized in the waters of the Jordan, which 
bent Its knees in the worship of the Temple, 
which bore Its own cross to Calvary ; that 
Body at which men wagged their heads in 
derision and crucified with malefactors, was 
the Body of God, — God before Whose pres- 
ence the hosts of Paradise bow their faces, 
and from Whom the angels of Heaven flee 
away ; God Who alone guides the stars, and 



tDljere is (Stob, tl)at 3 tnarj finb §itn. 27 

holds in the hollow of His hand the universe ; 
God Who alone controls the world, the flesh 
and the devil ; Who alone can forgive sin, 
and Who alone will raise the dead. 

And if you are sick or blind or tired or 
dying, and seek this God, you will find Him 
in His body. He said He would be with 
those that sought Him until the end of the 
world. But men answer, men who call them- 
selves religious men say He lied, He did not 
mean what He said. I am not speaking 
irreverently. Men must have intimated their 
want of belief in the statements of God, or the 
prophet would never have said, " God is not 
a man, that He should lie." Men must have 
contradicted the word of Heaven, or the apos- 
tle never would have written of God, "We 
make Him a liar." 

God said plainly, when upon the earth, 
that He would be with us till the end of 
time, but men say this also is a dream. 
You can find Him out among the stars, in 
theory, in philosophy, in His invisible King- 
dom, but not upon the earth. You may see 
Him in heaven. You can find Him in hell, 
but not in this world. Your journey of life 



28 toljm is C&ob, tljat 1 man imb §hn. 

must be made alone. You must find your 
own way, fight your own battles, win your 
own bread, and be conquered or defeated in 
your own strength. When you get to Para- 
dise you may see God, then you may be 
blessed by Him, but not here. 

When upon earth God said plainly, " This 
is my Body, this is my Blood. Whoso eateth 
my Flesh and drinketh my Blood, hath eter- 
nal life ; and I will raise him up at the last 
day." But men, men who say they are re- 
ligious, say this, too, is a dream. He did not 
mean what He said, He meant something 
else. He really meant nothing at all but to 
give expression to some generalities and un- 
deniable spiritual platitudes. 

God said, through His inspired word, the 
Church, which He purchased with His own 
Blood, " The Church, which is His Body." 
But men, men who call themselves religious, 
say this also is but a dream. 

The Church is not His Body, but a club, 
a coterie, a place for the meeting of people 
who have congenial tastes, an amalgamation of 
discordant sects, but nothing more. The 
only real Church is the invisible Church, the 



totjere is <K>ob, that 1 mag finfc Ijim. 29 

only real God is the God out among the 
stars. 

Such are the words heard on every side, 
such are the words which make sick the 
heart and fill the mind with doubt and horror. 
Such is the teaching which cries through the 
long winter night, " Put out every light, 
and smother the fire on every hearth ; for 
the fallen and the outcast there is the cold, 
the darkness, and the grave ; but never in 
this world either light or comfort or forgive- 
ness." Such is the teaching which blinds 
the beacon on every shore, and lets the noble 
ship find, if it may, through cloud and shoal 
and tempest, the haven where it would be ; 
but such, thank God, is not the teaching 
of Christmas, nor of that Catholic Church 
which gave us Christmas. It is the Faith of 
the Catholic Church, the very Heart of its 
Faith, that as God once dwelt in a child, in 
a Body that the storm beat, the mob stoned, 
the populace insulted, and the Jews cruci- 
fied, so God still dwells in that which is 
human, material, and visible. God still is 
found in that Church which is His Body ; 
that Church which men scorn, the world 



30 toiler* ie (&ob, trjat J man finb 4)im. 

derides, and the devil fights ; the Church 
insulted, " sore opprest, by schisms rent asun- 
der, by heresies distrest :" there, there God 
may still be found, there we may kneel at His 
feet, worship Him in spirit and in truth, be 
healed by His touch, be guided by His hand, 
be fed by His bounty, be saved by His love. 



Ety f^umanttg o( <ft|)rtstianitg. 



No one can write our " Ecce Homo" for us; no 
one can behold the Man in our stead. With our own 
eyes we must look upon, with our own ears we must 
listen to, and with our own hearts we must accept of, 
this Saviour and King. We must learn to say with 
Job, tl I know that my Redeemer liveth, and mine 
eyes shall behold Him and not another." And with 
David, "Although my house be not so with God, yet 
with me hath He made a covenant" And with the 
men of Samaria who said to the woman, "Now we 
believe ; not because of thy saying, but because we have 
heard Him ourselves, and know that this is indeed the 
Christ, the Saviour of the world" — Balgarnie. 




CHRISTMAS. 



&ty f^umanitg nf (ttijttsttattitg. 

I believe in one Lord Jesus Christ, who for us men, 
and for our salvation, came down from heaven and 
was Incarnate by the Holy Ghost of the Virgin Mary, 
and was made man. — The Nicene Creed. 

j]N his essay upon Milton, Lord Macau- 
lay tells us that the greatness of 
the English Dante lies in his power 
to leave some things unsaid and undescribed. 
Milton suggests, gives at times the outlines 
of some majestic figure, but a vast part of 
his picture is untouched, and the mind and 
imagination can finish the painting and give 
it that form and color it may be able to 
conceive and select. It is also to be re- 
membered that Dante himself, catching the 
first gleams of that white light which sweeps 
from the beatific vision, brings at once his 
immortal poem to its close. The perfect 
3 



34 &i)e ^txmanitrj of CtjristianitB. 



union of man's will with God's will, the one- 
ness of the light of the infinite with the dark- 
ness of the finite, Dante felt no human voice 
could express. The poetic genius which 
with bold and glaring strokes described hell, 
purgatory, and Paradise, which never for one 
moment hesitated to sing of the most sacred 
joy or to delineate the most awful passion, 
stood before the Incarnation with dropped 
hands and bowed head, because the great 
Italian knew that even the mystic might of 
epic poetry had not power to body into 
words the Divine mystery of Very God be- 
coming Very Man. 

Rightly, therefore, has fame ranked the 
solemn Tuscan with the immortal writer of 
the Iliad, because Dante knew with Homer 
the eloquent expressiveness of silence. It is 
also worthy of remembrance that when the 
wise men came to worship the God-child 
there is no record that they uttered word or 
line. They presented Him their gifts of 
gold, frankincense, and myrrh, they fell down 
and worshipped Him ; but there is no state- 
ment of any one either hearing or preaching 
a sermon, or attempting to explain that 



&!)£ 4§mttcmitn of Ctjristiattitj). 35 

which could not be explained. Wise men 
indeed, wiser than we word-beaten men of 
the modern centuries can imagine. 

It would seem well, therefore, on such a 
day, and amid such a scene of reverent 
beauty, to follow the old custom of the 
Church and speak no word of man's imagin- 
ing. There is such a danger when human 
thoughts are uttered of marring the lofty 
adoration of the Church with words that 
lower and detract, if indeed they do not 
check, the worship of the wise. 

History and experience, however, have 
taught us that words must sometimes be 
spoken even in an hour when the heart would 
fain lie quiet and alone in the light and rest 
of the eternal truth, for the mind of man 
was not content with simple statements in- 
fallibly inspired by God. It was not enough 
that S. John said, " The Word was made 
flesh and dwelt among us." "God manifest 
in the flesh," was a truth that the cavilling 
nature of humanity soon doubted ; and when 
from the last apostle came the startling, 
amazing statement, " That which was from 
the beginning we have heard, we have seen 



36 QLt)c $tiinamtn of Cljristianiti). 

with our own eyes, we have looked upon 
and our hands have handled, of the Word 
of Life," when so startling and amazing a 
statement came to the sceptical ear of man, 
he began to explain the meaning of such 
solemn words. All heresy is an attempt to 
explain, to simplify, what can neither be 
explained nor simplified. After years of ultra 
assertions and dangerous denials, came by 
necessity the great creeds, guarding by their 
authoritative sentences from the perils which 
beset the simple faith on every side. In the 
same way there is need in this day, not of 
words of explanation, but of words of warn- 
ing against the error of attempting to explain 
that Divine mystery before which Dante was 
great enough to be silent. All human expla- 
nations of the Incarnation have resulted in one 
of two errors : the explainer has been forced 
to give up either the humanity or the divinity 
of Jesus Christ our Lord. It was the heresy 
of the primitive ages, it is one of the radical 
heresies of modern unbelief, — the denial of 
the perfect humanity or the perfect divinity 
of our Lord. We know not in the sight of 
God whether it be a greater sin to deny that 



&t)* Qttittanitt) of Ctiristianitn. 37 

the Lord was Very Man, or whether the 
greater sin is to deny that He was Very God ; 
but this we do know, that the most cruel 
form of infidelity, as far as man is related to 
his fellow-man, is the denial of the humanity 
of Jesus Christ, the denial of Christmas Day, 
the denial that " the Word was made flesh 
and dwelt among us." To prove what has 
been said by a thought from a splendid and 
reverent mind, man in his religion may go to 
two extremes. In the first, he is an idolater. 
He gets a hideous image or a block of stone. 
That is his God. He fears it, prays to it, 
sometimes loves it and sometimes beats it; 
but always, if in trial or in trouble or in 
darkness, he turns to his God. But, mark 
you, this pagan's religion has in it the under- 
lying principle of all true religion : the man 
believes in a power outside of himself, a 
power to whom he can go and speak his sor- 
row or his sin, a power which in his own 
mind at least can appease the angry elements 
and satisfy the outraged law. 

The other extreme is that belief, you can- 
not call it religion, which believes in the Om- 
nipotence of one's own mental rhapsodies and 



38 &!)£ ^txtnanitn of <Et)ristiaitit2. 

hallucinations. It is the belief that nothing 
is to be accepted unless it can be explained, 
not even God Himself ; the belief that there 
may be somewhere an attenuated spiritual 
essence which primevally from himself may 
possibly have evolved protoplasm. This is 
the belief that rationalized the miracles, that 
questioned the reality of the Gospels, and 
which naturally ended in denying the Incar- 
nation. Not strangely does it follow that these 
men of science, falsely so-called, find them- 
selves at last with a God who can neither hear 
nor feel nor love, a God of no personality, a 
God which is a mere human idea, a colorless 
vapor, neither heavy nor light, but the natural 
and logical ending of a belief in a God hav- 
ing neither form nor humanity. We repeat, 
then, that of the two, the pagan had the bet- 
ter and more helpful belief. For his religion 
needed only to be rightly directed, he needed 
only the glad tidings of a gospel whose God 
had human form and at whose feet he could 
rest, a God from whom he might gain love, 
sympathy, and forgiveness. But how can you 
rightly direct the belief of a man whose reli- 
gion is a mere belief in his own omnipotence; a 



&!)£ Ijtttnanitn of Cl)ristianitg. 39 

belief that says, "God is nothing physical, re- 
ligion is nothing physical — unless it be purely 
mental and spiritual, religion is nothing ; " a 
belief that would explain at the Incarnation 
till in the words of the great New York Rec- 
tor, " It would be a mere web of fine threads 
stretched forth in mockery before us, brittle 
as glass, gray as ashes, sharp as new ice, cold 
as zero, before which the sin and sorrow of 
the world pass on unrelieved, while the un- 
happy heart longing for light, warmth, and 
life, for pardon and peace, for faith, hope and 
charity, wears itself away, consumed by its 
own distresses, and dies without a God or 
a future " ? Of the two extremes, without 
doubt, the pagan has the better religion. The 
glory of Christianity is that it holds the good 
of both, while it discards the extremes of 
both. The God of Christianity is really in 
our midst, — one tempted as we are tempted, 
and therefore able to succor those that are 
tempted ; a God that can be touched with the 
feeling of our infirmities, yet a spiritual God 
who can make the deaf to hear, the blind to 
see, and the dead to rise. And this is the 
very God the tired hearts of men crave, — one 



4o £!}£ ^umanitw of Christianity. 

at whose feet we may pray, from whose gar- 
ment may come healing, and whose hand may 
rest in benediction of eternal peace upon our 
weary heads, weary with the jar and the dis- 
cord, weary with the bitterness and disap- 
pointment of the passing days. 

Do not, therefore, allow the unbelief of 
the times to rob your religion of its human- 
ity. It is true that it is a spiritual religion, 
thank God for that, but do not emphasize 
that truth till it becomes a heresy denying 
the humanity of Christ. Do not spiritual- 
ize your religion till it is nothing but mist 
and vapor. It has been done in the past, 
it may be done again in the future. Be- 
ware of that belief which says the physical 
has nothing to do with religion. Remem- 
ber it was Christianity on its physical side 
which in the past gave us the grand cathe- 
drals, u Those creeds of stone and anthems 
of sculpture ; " it is the physical side that in 
this time builds the hospital for the sick, the 
shelter for the outcast, the home for the 
friendless. Beware of that belief which would 
make the Church of God barren and desolate, 
which would make the clothing of the King's 



Wc\z 4§ttmanit|> of Christianity. 4 1 

daughter not of gold, but of rags. Beware of 
that belief which cries, " Away with rites and 
forms and ceremonies ; away with deacon, 
priest, and bishop ; away with font and al- 
tar and sacrament ; away with your lights, 
though they speak of the Light of the world 
and the Divinity and Humanity of Christ ; 
away with your crosses, though they be the 
centre of all ritual, and shadow forth the sum 
and substance of your religion ; away with 
your flowers and greens and rood screens ; 
away with your colored windows and painted 
organs and white-robed choirboys, — away with 
all such things : ours is a spiritual religion, 
and has need of nothing but the mental grasp 
of spiritual things." 

Wait in patient sorrow when you hear such 
words ; for such a belief denies the necessity 
of the human and the sensuous in our reli- 
gious life, such a belief denies the meaning and 
the teaching of Christmas, such a belief may 
be entirely unconscious of it now, but such 
wild cries end in denying the Humanity of 
Jesus Christ our Lord. Hold fast to the 
glad tidings of that festival which commemo- 
rates and celebrates the Incarnation. It is 



4 2 ®t)£ ^nmanits of Christianity. 

the religion which feeds the hungry and gives 
drink to the thirsty, which visits the sick and 
clothes the naked, which in the hour of death 
will cheer which on the day of judgment 
will save. " Fear not," sang the angels. 
" Behold, I bring glad tidings of great joy 
which shall be to all people ; " not that God is 
simply divine, but that God is human, bone of 
our bone, flesh of our flesh, yet without sin. 
Sing on, white-robed messengers of God ; thy 
voices sound across the ages like the voice of 
many waters, the voice of the great thunder, 
the voice of heavenly harpers harping with 
their harps. 



Eijtxt is no BitEmiu*." 



And sin would make of heaven a very hell. 
Look to thyself, then, keep it out of door, 
Lest it get in and never leave thee more. 

—John Bunyan. 

loois make a meek of sxn. — Prov. xiv. 9. 

from tl)f propljet tvtn unto tlje priest tvtvx) one bcalttl) 
falseln. — Jer. vi. 13. 

3f roe ear) tljat roe banc no sin, toe oeceipe ourfleloea, 
ano ttjt trutt) \» not in u«. — 1 S. John, i. 8. 



LENT. 



"ffltyete is no difference/' 

For all have sinned and come short of the glory of 
God. — Rom. iii. 23. 




VER since we heard the word Chris- 
tianity, we have also heard the say- 
ing that we all are sinners. It 
seems to have been a sad sort of acknowl- 
edgment, ever since the world began, among 
all nations, and kindreds, and tongues, and 
peoples, this weary-hearted cry of the children 
of men, that they have done that which they 
ought not to have done, and left undone that 
which they ought to have done. It would 
seem naturally to follow from this universal 
testimony of human shortcomings that solem- 
nity should mark the thought of man and 
seriousness his action ; that he would, with- 
out delay, realize his true status and restrain 
his action accordingly. But we have no 



46 " (Etjere is no UbiStxentt." 

proof whatever that the vast body of man- 
kind believe that they are sinful. Of all 
who repeat the Litany, not one in ten feels 
with any depth of sorrow or contrition what 
is meant by the prayer, " Have mercy upon us 
miserable sinners." " Words, words, words," 
said the melancholy Dane. "Words that 
were given us to conceal our ideas," said 
the Frenchman with his light and mocking 
laugh. 

Certain facts and events, said a great nov- 
elist, while they remain without our borders 
are accepted as realities only mechanically, 
but when the changes and vicissitudes of 
time hurry them across our borders, and into 
our own doors, we are startled with the 
strangeness of the mighty portent of what we 
supposed ourselves to have fully known. 

" War is dreadful," says a man ; but, allow- 
ing much for the general truthfulness of such 
a man, we may safely say that he does not 
know what he is saying unless he has seen 
and felt a war. It is when the dead bodies 
of the slain lie in our fields, it is when the 
loved ones never return, and shot and shell 
burn our own homes, and destroy our own 



" ®L\\zxz is no ffli&excntc." 47 

city, that we understand what is meant by 
the saying, " War is dreadful." 

" The pestilence destroys and devastates," 
says another ; but it may be safely affirmed 
that a man is but repeating words who speaks 
in this wise unless he has seen and known a 
pestilence. It is when men no longer buy 
and sell in the market-place, it is when the 
streets are deserted, it is when the silence is 
only broken by the dead-cart rattling over 
the untrodden stones, and when the only cry 
in the stillness is, " Bring out your dead," 
that a man knows the meaning of the words, 
" The pestilence destroys and devastates." 

" Death is a solemn thing," repeats a man 
mechanically. Yea, to a man who has expe- 
rienced a touch of its deadly coldness, a 
moment of its unutterable loneliness, or an 
idea of the illimitable vastness of which it is 
but the beginning ; but, ordinarily speaking, 
a man has not the slightest idea of what he 
is saying when he utters the words, " Death 
is a solemn thing." The funeral that stopped 
your way last week you forgot in an hour. 
Your own death, nearer than you imagine, 
and as inevitable as the coming night — you 



48 " ®l)ere is no ^Difference. 11 

will not even think of that next week, and if 
you do you are an exception, and the excep- 
tion proves the rule. 

Just in this way do we speak of ourselves 
as being miserable sinners. We utter words, 
but do not mean them. We mourn in good 
and classic language, but not in heart. 

If a question be raised as to the correct- 
ness of these statements, will it not suffice to 
answer that likely no man in this congrega- 
tion was kept awake one hour last week 
troubling about his sins ; yea, did any man 
within hearing lie wakeful and weary, not 
last week, but one hour in all last year, 
because he had sinned ? Many things keep 
us awake at night, — the biting cold, the with- 
ering heat, the brawl in the street, the beat- 
ing of political drums, the rattling of a win- 
dow, a cup of strong coffee, the riot and 
revelry of pleasure, the cares and anxiety of 
business ; all these things and many others 
take the sweetness and restfulness out of that 
innocent sleep " which knits up the ravelled 
sleeve of care," but few and far between are 
the men who in these times toss nervously 
the hours of night away, moaning in spiritual 



" QTtjm ia no JDiffmnre.'* 49 

pain over the memory of God's law, broken 
and unfulfilled. 

The reason for this lethargy of conviction 
lies in the simple fact that men do not believe, 
do not feel, do not care to feel or to know 
that they are sinners. " Were uneasiness of 
conscience, " wrote a thoughtful soul, " meas- 
ured by extent of crime, human history had 
been different, and one should look to see 
the contrivers of greedy wars, and the mighty 
marauders of the money market in one troop 
of self-lacerating penitents, with the meaner 
robber, and the cut-purse, and the murderer 
that doth his butchery in small with his own 
hand." But uneasiness of conscience not 
being marked by extent of crime, the world 
history is what it has been, — very dark and 
full of wrong. The vital requisite, however, 
of Christianity is the knowledge and the pen- 
itent avowal that we are sinners, all, every 
one, child and father, fair and homely, pau- 
per and affluent, layman and priest, each, 
all, and every one of every place, and of every 
age, miserable sinners. If this be not a fact, 
Holy Scripture and the Church have no mean- 
ing. " All we, like sheep, have gone astray ; 
4 



50 "(Eljere is 1x0 difference." 

all have sinned and come short of the glory 
of God," is the cry from Genesis to Revela- 
tion. It was the confession of the Church 
in the days gone, it must be the sorrow of 
the earthly Church till time shall be no more. 

To believe that truth fully, entirely, hon- 
estly, and humbly, is an absolute necessity if 
one would ever have that new and contrite 
heart which alone obtains of the God of all 
mercy perfect remission and forgiveness. 
To prove beyond a peradventure that all 
men are sinners, there is no need of appeal- 
ing to Holy Scripture, nor to that Church 
which wrote and kept the Scriptures. The 
proof is a mere matter of unquestioned his- 
tory and daily observation, the denial of 
which involves the logical sequence of the 
denial of all earthly and material phenomena. 
Sin is not a matter of faith, but a fact of 
unanswerable evidence. 

We know first of all that certain crying evils 
marked certain centuries. There was a time 
when men bitterly persecuted: cruel, unrelent- 
ing, merciless, was the temper of such times ; 
this passed to a time of wilful ignorance, and 
this to a time of extravagant luxury and 



" Sl^ere is no UUftettftue." 51 

moral laxity ; this led to a time of strange 
carelessness regarding religious duties, to a 
time of arrogant intellectual pride. You may 
go on, if you please, but you will not find an 
age unmarked by some great evil, an evil 
which became the fashion of its day, a fash- 
ion which swayed the men of its time as 
the tempest sways the field of grain, a fash- 
ion which marred the symmetry and branded 
with stain and scar the fair proportions of all 
God-given life. History shows, moreover, 
that the men of those times were to a greater 
or less degree unconscious of the power and 
destructiveness of the pervading evil of their 
age, and lived and died unsoftened by its 
knowledge and unabsolved by its confession. 
By analogy we know there must exist great 
and awful evils in our own day, and judged 
by all other things which mark the age, these 
evils must be of huge proportions, united 
with gigantic strength, yet be powers none 
the less insidious, seductive, and triumphant. 
If, therefore, we be like men of other times 
— and there is no evidence that we are differ- 
ent — then are we enswathed and environed 
with the danger and the evil of a time, bad 



52 " $t)£re is 1x0 JBiffmnce." 

at the core, and rotten at the heart ; an age 
of heresy and schism, of strife and division, 
of unbelief, both popular and profound ; an 
age of intemperance and lasciviousness, of 
sloth and spiritual sluggishness, an age of 
irreverence and ungodliness ; fearing neither 
man nor God, desperate and foolhardy unto 
direct madness. Such is the age and the 
spirit which is leaving its impress upon our 
hearts, and which is carefully and success- 
fully making us more and more what nature 
found us, — sinners against the light of heaven, 
the laws of God, and the peace of our immor- 
tal destiny. 

Without asking proof of Church or reve- 
lation, let us go on to speak of another evi- 
dence of the all-surrounding sin, and that 
evidence is the common every-day habit we 
all have of seeing the sins of other people. 
We think in our thoughts, too often we say 
in our words, that man yonder is mean and 
selfish, and grows more so with advancing 
years ; that woman thinks only of what she 
can eat, or what fine gowns she can wear ; 
this man, we say, is too careless, not only of 
his own interest, but the interest of every one 



" &l)ere is no difference. " 53 

who knows him ; and that woman has a slan- 
derous tongue, ever wagging evil of her 
neighbor. Another, we say, is peevish and 
petty and bad tempered ; while near her lives 
a man so conceited and so well satisfied with 
himself, that he has never yet been able to 
see the largeness of his own feet. This one 
we said was a chronic grumbler, that other 
one a mild lunatic. Even as I have gone 
over this category of common every-day sins, 
some of you have been thinking of certain 
people of whom, in your mind at least, these 
things were true. Judged by our own 
thoughts, humanity without question is in a 
bad way ; for in our own eyes we are sur- 
rounded with uncleanness and lasciviousness, 
with idolatry and witchcraft, hatred and vari- 
ance, emulation and strife, wrath and sedi- 
tion, envyings and heresies, murder and 
drunkenness. Now, what is solemn about it 
all is, that to a fearful extent these thoughts 
of ours are true ; and what is more solemn, the 
point ever to be remembered, the evidence 
daily and constantly to be recalled, is that 
other people think of us even as we also think 
of them, and sad to say, think the truth, for 



54 " ftljm is no UDiffmnce." 

I am but what you are, and you are but what 
I am, and we are both men who have sinned. 
Let but one other evidence to-day be 
adduced, that all have sinned and come 
short of the glory of God. That evidence 
is the deceitfulness of habit. When you first 
began to forget and to neglect your prayers, 
it troubled you more or less. You rose from 
the easy bed and said fervently the forgotten 
prayer. After awhile you said your prayers 
on the street as you walked along in the morn- 
ing ; but as the bad habit of neglected prayer 
went on, the voice of conscience grew fainter, 
till now, God have mercy, it is not heard at 
all, and if conscience speaks, it is to ears 
stopped with stone. When first we refused 
to give to worthy causes, it worried some of 
the peace from the complacent day, but as 
the habit went on we hardened under it, till 
now nothing disturbs the equanimity of our 
luxurious indulgence. The priest may moan 
and the Church thunder, but we only answer, 
" Let the beggar have a part of that which I 
do not need, but do not trouble me for 
more." And if one troubles such an one he 
will pay for it in severe words. 



" Qtt)cxe is no ^Difference." 55 

There are many sins other than selfish- 
ness and neglected prayer, sins dark and 
not commonly named against men, which 
were very hard to begin, but now neither 
blanch the face nor disturb the heart's beating, 
because habit has made them easy, while the 
intellect has trained itself to excuse them as 
necessary or unavoidable. But however art- 
ful a casuist a man train himself to be, how- 
ever shrewdly he deceive even his own soul, 
though conscience be drugged and the rest 
of the man of character be outwardly good, 
still it is forever true that sweet is not bitter, 
nor bitter sweet, light is not darkness, nor 
darkness light, and though it be that even 
our hearts do not condemn us, yet God is 
greater than our hearts and knoweth all 
things. 

We might go on and adduce those other 
evidences which exist outside of Church and 
Scripture, and which prove beyond a doubt 
the sin and shame of every human soul, but 
here to-day will we draw to a close such 
awful evidences. If, hearing them, any soul 
should honestly and penitently feel its sin 
and ask the old question, " What shall I do 



$6 " (Eljere is no Mttttznte. 11 

to be saved ? " there is but one answer worthy 
of consideration. That answer comes not 
from the profound philosophy of Confucius, 
nor from the shallow mystic lore of modern 
transcendentalism ; it comes not from the 
dim flickering of him who first spoke of the 
midnight oil, nor from the brilliant ignis 
fatuus Light of Asia. From but One in his- 
tory comes there any word of cheer to glad- 
den the heart's heaviness, and that word is 
from Him whose Church has kept so care- 
fully and sacredly the saying : " Let not your 
heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid. 
Ye believe in God, believe also in Me." 
"Though your sins be as scarlet, yet shall 
they be as white as snow." 



&§t jSabiout from Sbin. 



<£> uirctctjefc man ttjat J am ! vo\jo flljall bettorr me from 
([)( bobp of ttjis fccatl)? — Romans, vii. 24. 

Out, damned spot ! out, I say ! — 
What, will these hands ne'er be clean ? — 
Here's the smell of blood still : all the perfumes of 

Arabia will not sweeten this little hand — Oh ! Oh / 

Oh I — Lady Macbeth. 

The approaches of sin are like the conduct of Jael. 
It " brings butter in a lordly dish." It bids high for 
the soul. But, when it has fascinated and lulled the 
victim, the nail and the hammer are behind. — CECIL. 




LENT. 



&f)e jSabtour from j5ht. 

He shall save His people from their sins. 

— S. Matthew, i. 21. 

i]F man made his choice without great 
and serious thought, it is not at all 
likely he would select a Redeemer 
who came merely to save him from his sins. 

Ask, one by one, the long line of men who 
daily pass down the great street of the city, 
and the vast proportion will say : Save us 
from the hard times, from our friends, from 
our relatives, from sickness, from death ; but 
from our sins — really, we had not thought 
much about our sins. Most men would say 
that their sins were not very many, nor very 
serious, nor sins that would necessarily bring 
them disastrous results. 

Therefore, to learn the meaning of the 
text, we must first consider the fact and evil 
of sin. 



60 &[)* Samottr from Sin. 

Sin — who has ever described it, who has 
ever measured the extent of its ravages ? Sin 
— that blur upon the canvas of creation, that 
discord in the music of the spheres, that can- 
cer upon the face and breast of humanity. 
By theologians, who at least felt the enormity 
of sin, sin was denned as any transgression of, 
or want of conformity unto, the law of God. 
By the law of God was meant, not the 
restricted decalogue of the Old Testament, 
but the high white morality of the New 
Testament ; the righteousness not merely of 
the letter, but of the spirit ; not merely, 
"Thou shalt not murder," but also, Thou 
shalt keep alive. 

By the Church, greater than all human 
systems of theology, sin has been defined as 
that which separates from the peace and 
rest of God ; that which causes all sorrow 
and affliction, all disappointment, all death. 
It began with our first parents, and, like 
death, it will last till our race has run its 
course. Sin comes into the quiet home, and 
jars and jangles all its peace by some violent 
difference over a trifle ; it goes into trade, 
and makes man defraud and grind his fellow- 



®lje Samour from Sin. 61 

man ; it goes into the life of the community, 
and arraying labor against capital, and capital 
against labor, fills the streets with riot and 
bloodshed ; it goes into the national life, and 
corrupts men in high station, makes patriot- 
ism a term of irony, and official position a 
synonym of reproach. It gets down into the 
personal life of the young, and takes inno- 
cency from their face and purity from their 
heart ; it gets into middle-aged manhood, 
and fills him with uncontrolled ambition 
and shrivelling avarice ; it gets into middle- 
aged womanhood, and makes her an idle, 
useless gossip, endlessly wagging evil of her 
neighbors ; it gets into old age, and makes it 
crabbed and gnarled, makes it suspicious of 
every noise, and forgetful of the eternal youth 
of the life to come. 

Oh, well has Holy Scripture called sin 
a burden, a thief, a sickness, a leprosy, a 
plague, a poison, a serpent with venomous 
sting, a load of evil beneath whose most 
crushing and intolerable pressure " the whole 
creation groaneth " ! 

If what has been said were all, how little 
would it matter ! If the evil of sin ended 



62 &l)£ Samour from Sin. 

with this life, how slight in comparison would 
be the consequences ! But sin is not content 
with marring and marking a man's body even 
to the grave — it goes beyond the deepest grave 
and the darkest night and the farthest star, 
and stamps the soul with the stigma not of 
Christ, but of hell ; for sin sends a man from 
this life with character fixed the wrong way, 
at discord with himself and at enmity with 
God. The devil is a wise serpent and has 
marked his own goats, and they have made 
no objection to the stigma. Nor is there 
anything earthly that can remove that brand 
of the devil, burnt in with passion and cooled 
and chilled with the atheism and infidelity 
of indifference. The flood that buried 
mountains could not wash sin away ; the fire 
that fell from heaven and destroyed cities 
left sin untouched ; the earthquake that 
opened the ground and swallowed the 
mountains could not with its rocky jaws 
crush even the foot of sin ; the pestilence 
that walked in darkness, and which slew the 
nations with its ghastly hands, went cheek by 
jowl with sin ; and wisely and rightly, for the 
earthquake and the flood and the fire and 



&l)£ Sturiottr from 0in. 63 

the pestilence that walketh in darkness were 
but sin itself. An atom, said a wise man, 
may kill a giant, a spark may burn a city, a 
word may clash every nation of the earth into 
mortal combat ; but every atom and spark 
and word of the whole universe could not 
make white as snow the scarlet stain of sin. 
Great truly was that Greek when he said, 
" God may forgive sin, but I do not know 
why He should." Well, says some hearer of 
these words, these generalizations are true 
enough, no doubt, but what have they to do 
with me, or what have I to do with them ? 

Everything in heaven and on earth. It is 
not the race God will deal with, but with the 
individual — every man shall give an account 
of himself. " I saw the dead, small and great, 
stand before God ; and the books were 
opened : . . . and they were judged every 
man according to their works." 

Humanity hopes to escape the responsibility 
of existence by massing and lumping itself, 
and saying, " We are miserable sinners," but 
this pretence will not suffice. 

" Ten thousand people," says a man, " are 
indifferent to all religious subjects. I am one 



64 &t)£ Statrionr from Sin 



of them, and therefore in the last day will 
have one ten-thousandth of the blame to 
bear." 

" You are mistaken, my brother : in the 
last day you will have to answer for that sin 
of indifference as though you were the only 
man in the world." 

" Really," answers the man, " I am not in- 
different to this great subject. I live a good 
moral life, seldom, if ever, breaking a com- 
mandment." 

" Indeed ! do you not steal ? " 

" Steal ! No ; I never stole in my life ! " 

11 Have you never read that verse, that 
when thou sawest a thief thou consentedst 
with him ? When you knew there was deceit 
in the business, and peculation in high places, 
have you ever spoken a word or lifted your 
hand to alter this state of affairs ? " 

" Really," answers the man, " I do not call 
this stealing. I have always felt that some one 
else must look after that mild form of wrong." 

" Well, have you ever heard that chapter 
in Malachi about a man robbing God of 
tithes and offerings ? " 

" Yes, I have heard that in church ; but 



ftb* 0at)iottt from Sin. 65 

you know it is in the Old Testament, and 
this is the new dispensation. Besides, probably 
I give as much in proportion as the rest do." 

" That is your guide and standard — what 
others do ? Then you have chosen a crite- 
rion that will not stand the light of God. 
Come, my brother, let us be honest. Life 
hurries to its close and death comes, but 
' after that the judgment.' In the face of 
that judgment we are thieves — the most of us. 
Men may call us honest and respectable, but 
you and I know it is all untrue. We are 
thieves. We have repeated evil words of our 
neighbors, though we had no proof of what 
we said, merely the say-so of some one else. 
We have given neither God nor His Church 
that portion of time and money and influence 
which we would give if we knew that death 
was but a few hours off. 

Let us be honest for once, you and I, and 
own the fact that we have stolen from man, 
and robbed God and His most Holy Church ; 
and that robbery, grave as it is, is but one of 
a thousand wrongs — some the world knows 
of, and some the world does not know of, 
but God knows them all, and knows that 
5 



66 fftlje Qavionx from Sin. 

even to-day we love some one of these sins 
more than we love the Holy and the Eternal. 
That is the awful work of sin, not that God 
will punish it, but that it sets wrong the 
direction of our being — sets it toward Hell 
and not toward Paradise. 

That is the evil to be feared more than 
the devil and all his angels, not that God 
will forsake us, but that we will forsake and 
hate God. That is the hell where the worm 
dieth not and the fire is not quenched. 

Oh the strange and violent bias of humanity, 
that it should so often make such a choice, 
that it should so often end itself in madness, 
for sin is madness — madness such as Hogarth 
painted. 

The madman of the artist, chained to his 
rock wall, thinks that he is a king ; the straw 
upon the stone floor is to him the softest 
velvet ; his keepers are obsequious courtiers, 
and the maniacs who pass his grated doors are 
royal ambassadors and kingly suppliants. A 
sad and pitiful picture, but not so sad and 
insane as that daily scene of men who, on the 
ledge of life and the narrow crust of earth, 
laugh and sing and dance all content — living 



QL\)e %amonx from Sin. 67 

in a dream, and all oblivious of the awful 
depth and tremendous reality of human 
existence. 

Is there any power in God's earth to bring 
us back to sanity, back to ourselves, that, like 
the prodigal, we may go home to our Father's 
house ? Is there any power greater than this 
mighty world and its mighty evils ? O weary, 
troubled child of God, there is one — One who 
said to troubled hearts, " Be of good cheer, I 
have overcome the world." He it was, who, 
for us men and for our salvation, came down 
from heaven and was Incarnate of the Holy 
Ghost of the Virgin Mary. 

" They shall call His name Jesus, for He 
shall save His people from their sins." This 
verse of Holy Scripture, therefore, explains 
much that is not entirely understood. It 
explains why there is one name which the 
Hebrew nation never spoke. It explains 
why over five hundred times St. Paul writes 
the sacred name in his epistles. It explains 
why the beautiful " De Nomine Jesu," of St. 
Bernard, is numbered among the seven great 
hymns. It explains why the Maid of Orleans, 
with so many other of the saints of God, passed 



68 &|)£ 0at)ionr from Sin. 

to the Church of the hereafter, saying that one 
sweetly sacred word, Jesu — Jesu. It explains 
why the greatest living English orator, when he 
speaks that sacred name, bends low his noble 
head, because Henry Parry Liddon believes, 
with the Church of all ages, that Jesus is the 
one name under heaven, given among men, 
whereby we can be saved from the death of 
sin, and raised unto the life of righteousness. 



<&mtix Bag. 



I DEDICATE 

cpHESE Easter thoughts to those 
■%£ many in God's great world across 
whose thresholds have fallen the 
shadows of that Friday called 
Good. I dedicate them to those 
?nany whose loved ones 7oait now 
in peace and quietness for the last 
Easter Morning. 

F. M. C. 

"3 loot for ttje ttcsurrcction of tJje 3Den& ; ano tt)t 
fife of tt)f tDorlo to come. Slmcn."— The Nicene 
Creed. 



(Qmttx Bag. 




1 Death is swallowed up in victory." — i Cor. xv. 54. 

j]N the sense men commonly quote 
this verse, it is utterly untrue. They 
interpret it to say, Death is now a 
victory ; but in relation to this life, death 
is not a victory, but a most signal defeat 
— a most overwhelming overthrow. In any 
way it may please to come, and at any time, 
death to an earnest soul is always dreadful ; 
it is ruin, it is a collapse, it is a downfall 
from which a man on this earth will never 
rise again. You remember how it came to 
your friend. He was a good man, living 
and striving for a noble purpose — to make 
better the world, and to give God the glory. 
Suddenly in the midst of his work there 
came a stop. His home was full of mourn- 
ing, but he did not move a finger to soothe 
the bitter anguish. Men praised him, the 



72 ©aster EDarj. 

world lauded him, but still and silent he 
lay, not worth his weight in clay. He was 
dead ; he was dust ; he was utterly useless : 
so they buried him lest he should harm them. 
It is irony to call such an event a victory. 

Recall another life. It was a young wife 
and mother. She had so much to do — her 
husband to help and encourage, her little 
ones to lead in the way God would have 
them go, to bring them by His grace into 
holy manhood and womanhood. But death 
came. The children call all night, Mamma, 
mamma ! The father lies with buried face 
and broken heart, unable to answer the ques- 
tion of his child, Where is mamma ? No 
victory here, my brother ; only irreparable 
loss. 

Now recall an instance from Holy Scrip- 
ture : David had a favorite child, but the 
child fell sick. If any one gains the victory, 
surely it will be David. The innumerable 
army, with its mighty men of valor, wait his 
command ; the astrologers are there to draw 
magic from the skies ; the sages are there 
with their wisdom of lore ; the physicians 
are there with their healing arts ; the coffers 



faster lUa^. 73 



are full of gold ; the chests are packed with 
precious stones ; the king himself, wrapped 
in sackcloth and ashes, is praying. Well, 
what of it ? The pale woman, as the Romans 
called her, has entered with her iron slum- 
ber. The black camel of the Arabs has 
knelt at the palace stairs. Down at the river 
the old oarsman has moored his boat, and in 
the room where the child is dying the Per- 
sian Hand of Fate lays two fingers on the 
eyes, two on the ears, one on the mouth, and 
in the silence cries, " Be forever still ! " A 
victory — but for death. 

And who but recalls here that which last 
Friday celebrated ? The Great and Holy 
One, went He to His death in calm, stoical 
indifference ? Oh, no ! but with trembling 
body, with troubled heart, with sorrowful 
soul, with soul heavy even unto death — 
praying — agonizing to the Father till the 
blood death-damp and all was finished. 

So, my brother, must you go forth to meet 
your last hour. I do not mean to say death 
has not and may not again be met peacefully 
and hopefully. There have been times, and 
in them were men who so daily and closely 



74 (faster JDaj). 



walked with God, that death was merely 
another translation ; the first unfolding of the 
beatific vision. But it is likely the men to 
whom I speak to-day will of a necessity be 
forced to live and die in the maddening rush 
of American life ; side by side must they 
strive with sin, and sorrow, and selfishness ; 
cheek by jowl must they struggle with the 
world, the flesh, and the devil — their days a 
prayer of faith, their nights a prayer of 
repentance. Death will find such men, God 
grant, in His sight ready, but in their own 
sight unready. Upon them will come a sick- 
ening feeling of failure. There were so many 
things they had hoped to have done, but too 
late now. The night has come, in which no 
man can work. And then, too, a feeling of 
uncertainty will sweep over them, for the 
faith of so many Christians is such poor 
material. I fear it will not avail to keep 
from them a sensation of dread when they 
come to cross the portals. Then, too, mem- 
ory will rouse to an abnormal, a miraculous 
activity, and crowd into the remaining mo- 
ments pictures of forgotten years — years full 
of sin and destroying evil — years when death 



€aster Ba$. 75 



was despised and God forgotten. Moreover, 
remember the unspeakable loneliness of that 
hour, when in the flush of strength we do not 
like to be alone ; our soul cries out too loudly 
against us of its wrongs, and God speaks too 
tenderly, too awfully, of all things : so we 
keep in the midst of the crowd and drown 
these voices. But the death hour separates ; 
the roar and rattle of store, and office, and 
street, fade into distance ; human sympathy 
and human companionship are out of place ; 
we are alone at last, and the loneliness is 
indescribable. Come, says Memory ; come, 
says Conscience ; come, says Death ; let us 
go to God ; and the man who by a life-long 
refusal has mocked the " Come " of Christ 
goes now at last " like the quarry slave at 
night scourged to his dungeon." 

Humanly, physically speaking, then, the 
heathen idea of death seems the right one, — 
that death not only crushes the flower in its 
bud, but leaves not a breath of its sweetness ; 
not only loses the race, but kills the runner ; 
not only breaks the strings of the harp, but 
buries the player ; not only dashes the ship 
against the rocks, but drowns eternally the 



76 faster Dan. 



crew. For in relation to all human physical 
life death is an irrevocable law ; a law, cruel, 
subtle, certain, resistless ; a law to grind out 
and scatter, to wear out and destroy, utterly 
and eternally. 

What did St. Paul mean, then, in quoting 
these words concerning the swallowing up of 
death in victory ? To catch the beauty of a 
jewel, you must see it in its setting, not out of 
it. To get the clear, full meaning of sacred 
words, you must hear the sentences which 
surround them. All the strife, all the divis- 
ions, all the false teachings of Christianity 
so-called, find their beginning here. You see 
on printed cards, and hear men beating the 
air with the voice, " Touch not ; taste not ; 
handle not ; " but the apostle never used the 
words except to protest against them. You 
hear a man — often a man who has failed to 
get the best of the shrewder men about him 
— you hear him say, " Money is the root of 
all evil," and then he looks resigned ; he has, 
he thinks, quoted the Bible — a very com- 
mendable act. But the Bible never said so. 
Holy Scripture says, " The love of money," 
the inordinate grasping after the earthly and 



faster JBa%. 77 



material — that is the root of all evil ; and so 
it is. 

And so it was the great Apostle said, not 
now Death is swallowed up in victory, but 
then. Then shall be brought to pass the 
saying, Death is swallowed up in victory. 
Men forget or ignore the then, the afterward ; 
so the present becomes a failure. They 
measure a man's life by the number of his 
days here, by the houses he owns, by the 
amount of his bank account, by the positions 
he commands. But one day death corners 
the market ; and when you hear of the man 
again, he is in distressingly reduced circum- 
stances. The house he lies in is only broad 
enough for one — may be deep enough for two. 
His little bit of real estate no one cares to 
possess, especially for his own use, and his 
ledger account has items in it nothing can 
exactly balance. 

Let it be repeated what has been said a 
thousand times before, that if you measure 
your life by its present surroundings ; if you 
limit its aim and purpose to the length of the 
natural ; if you narrow its possibility down 
to the seventy or eighty years you happen 



78 (faster JUan. 



by fortune to stand the summer suns and 
weather the winter winds, — then the end will 
be failure. It must be what Holy Scripture 
always makes it, — a dream, a vapor, a pilgrim- 
age, a fading flower, a bunch of withered 
grass, a tale that is told, a shadow passing 
with the cloud ; and then what might have 
been the victory is swallowed up — in death. 

There are so many of us who are like cer- 
tain men you know. They were born and 
have always lived in some far inland village ; 
have never travelled twenty miles from their 
miserable little town ; say they have no desire 
to. Around them on every side, stretching 
far away, lies the rich, great nation, with its 
cities, and rivers, and mountains, and unlim- 
ited resources. But the man who has never 
thought or dreamed of the land beyond — 
whose life interests settle in the dozen houses 
and one street of his little burg — thinks his 
little dorp the centre of trade and commerce. 
Sweep his borough from off the face of earth, 
by fire or wind or water, and his interest in 
existence is gone. 

There are so many such men about our 
doors — local, narrow, wedged-in men, " of 



(Easter Dag. 79 



the earth earthy," who shall return to earth 
at last — and stay there. Fishers are such 
men, on some little lake where the land is 
encroaching. Day by day they watch the 
waters getting dark and full of earth, the 
great country getting nearer. Do they re- 
joice ? No. Such men have no taste or lik- 
ing for the fertile meadows, the fruitful fields, 
the waving forests. The question of life 
with such men is simply a question of fish. 

Now, said the great Apostle, sweep your 
thought, your life, beyond its mere local 
settlement — its mere earthly closing ; for 
when the village lies in ashes or is beaten 
down by storm and time, when the rolling, 
rippling lake has become a stagnant pool, 
beyond is the better country, the " sweet and 
blessed country which eager hearts expect." 
And the Easter of God's Church says, with 
the great Apostle, " Look beyond ! " The 
sackcloth and ashes wherein your sins have 
wrapped you, cast them aside ; the Lenten 
dole forget, or let the memory of it scourge 
you into something better. Rise, oh sleep- 
ing, faithless disciples ! Easter has come 
again. " Rise, let us be going." 



8o (Easter JDag. 



Too well we know men in the Church 
make a heartless form of Easter ; and men 
outside, not understanding, think it an empty- 
form. It is the day when the slack Romanist 
gets absolved from sins from which the Great 
High Priest has not absolved. It is the day 
when the pseudo Churchman makes his annual 
communion. It is the day when kind friends 
who wish us well come to see the sweet 
flowers, or to hear the sweeter music. But 
to him whose heart is right, to him who holds 
the Fact it has for long centuries proclaimed, 
it is the day which stands alone in time ; a day 
to strengthen the weak and lift up the fallen ; 
a day to bring health to the sick and comfort 
to the sorrowful ; a day which has given 
sweetness to manners and holiness to morals ; 
a day which must at last set the bondman 
free and let the dead arise ; for to-day, in the 
ages past, Jesus, called Christ, arose from 
the dead, bringing the hope, bodying forth 
the Fact, that the stone on every human 
grave may at last be rolled away. 

Men who do not yet accept that fact must 
feel glad to-day that other men can, and 
more and more are all people beginning to 



<£ast*r Dag. 81 



suspect and despise that pretended icono- 
clasm, which, going up and down the land, 
filches and robs men of all fearless faith and 
holy hope, and which gives only eternal death 
to take their place. 

The Resurrection of Christ, then, is the 
sure, the sweet, the only hope for you and 
me, when the day of work is done. If He 
arose, why then all is clear, all is plain, all 
is well. If He did not, why then at last we 
must be — yea, are we already — "men most 
miserable," whether or not we know it. The 
faith is vain, the " fallen asleep are perished," 
the whole affair called Christianity is a sham, 
a fabrication, an imposture on the human 
race, and the purest system of morality the 
world ever knew is the outgrowth of a stu- 
pendous lie. Bear home with you, then, 
why men believe in the Resurrection of the 
Dead, for we stand ready to give an answer 
to him that asketh us a reason of the hope 
that is in us. Bear with you in your hearts, 
for evermore, the reason why in weariness and 
painfulness, in watchings often, in hunger 
and thirst, in fastings often, in cold and 
nakedness, holy men of old went daily ; why 
6 



82 (Easter Stag. 



neither tribulation nor distress, persecution 
nor famine, nakedness nor peril, height nor 
depth, life nor death, ever separated such 
men from the Cross or the Faith it daily 
speaks. 

The saying, Death is swallowed up in vic- 
tory, is a quotation. Seven hundred years 
before St. Paul lived, the evangelical prophet 
wrote, u He will swallow up death in victory, 
and the Lord God will wipe away tears from 
off all faces." From Genesis to Revelation 
runs a reiteration or fulfilment of that tender 
prophecy. Calmly, ever hopefully, looks 
God's holy Word on death as a sleep for the 
beloved, a rest from labor. The body is a 
garment to be laid aside for the robe of glory, 
a house which, dissolving, leaves one eternal 
in the heavens. " He shall not return to me, 
but I shall go to him." "Awake and sing, 
ye that dwell in the dust." "Thy brother 
shall rise again." "Who shall change our 
vile bodies like unto His own glorious body." 
" I saw a multitude no man could number." 
"This mortal must put on immortality." 
Then " Death is swallowed up in victory." 
He who runs must read, that God's Word 



(Easter JDaj). 83 

teaches, is built upon the fact of, the Resur- 
rection of the Dead. 

Let us go further. Holy Scriptures teach, 
God is love. Now life is full of broken 
friendship, sundered love, unfinished work. 
If God is love, sometime, somewhere, the 
true friend must meet his friend ; the earnest, 
unfinished work, the unfulfilled purpose of 
life, will not remain forever broken columns ; 
somewhere, sometime, finished pillars must 
they stand in the temple up above. And 
He who will not quench the smoking flax 
or break the bruised reed — He who is love 
all infinite — will bring again the loved and 
lost. The broken friendship, the broken love 
of life, proves its immortality. 

But you do not believe the Bible. Hear, 
then, the voice of history. The arguments 
which exist to prove the Resurrection of 
Jesus Christ are more cogent and conclusive 
than any which are advanced to prove the 
existence of Julius Caesar. With the line of 
argument advanced against the Resurrection 
by the advanced German critics, the great 
logician, Whately, proved the non-existence 
of Napoleon ; and the greatest of the most 



84 ©aster IDa^. 



modern thinkers has shown that if you invali- 
date the evidence which sustains the Bible 
and the central fact of Christianity, you can 
wipe out all history. Unanswerable also is 
the argument that, unless some such miracu- 
lous event had occurred, the scattered, be- 
wildered, dismayed disciples would never 
again have banded together ; for to be a 
follower of Jesus Christ in that day meant 
more than the soft cushion, fair weather, 
fashionable affair, it does now. It meant 
poverty. It meant persecution. In the case 
of every apostle, except one, it meant death. 
Now, men do not to-day, did not then, sacri- 
fice life or any of its comforts, unless the 
faith which was the principle of their action 
was a faith wider than the world, and infi- 
nitely farther reaching than this life. 

You do not believe the Bible. Hear, 
then, the voice of nature. Hear why Easter 
comes in the spring time. Because the win- 
ter is ended and all things bud forth. The 
ice-bound brooks are running ; the old, 
musty, dead-looking seeds are warming into 
life and beauty for your garden ; the poor 
worm crawling out of the ground will soon 



faster Dag. 85 

take wings of exquisite color and fly away ; 
thus bud and leaf, singing brook and singing 
bird, and every tiny creature of the dust, 
speak what the Holy Church to-day pro- 
claims, — the gospel of immortality. Com- 
passed about are we indeed with a cloud of 
witnesses in earth and sky and sea, saying 
there are no dead men, but "all live unto 
Him." " Thou fool, that which thou sowest 
is not quickened, except it die." 

Vou do not believe the Bible. Hear, then, 
the voice of science. You can sink one 
chemical into another, and form a third ; the 
very chemical composition, molecular struct- 
ure, of the former two is destroyed. You 
can throw in another chemical, and restore 
all to their original constituents. You are 
not the same man you were a few years ago. 
Not one atom of the body you now live in is 
the same. Nothing remains of what you 
were ten years ago except your physical and 
spiritual identity ; nothing except the scars. 

You do not believe the Bible. Hear, then, 
the voice of universal belief. One of the 
most unpleasant points for the sceptic is the 
fact that the people never denied the con- 



86 (Staer Dan. 



stantly repeated assertion of the apostle that 
Jesus rose from the dead. It was not a 
thing done in a corner, said St. Paul. Now, 
the Scribes and Pharisees were ever on the 
alert for some weak point. They would 
have hurled a triumphant denial of the resur- 
rection in the face of the disciples, were not 
the facts so plain and well known by living 
witnesses about them that a denial would 
have rebounded against themselves ; and this 
general belief finds sympathy in every heart 
and nation. Not a people yet found who 
have not some belief in a hereafter. Long 
before Christ and His blessed gospel of im- 
mortality, classic writers taught and held that 
the relation of the soul to the body was that 
of rower to the boat. "The sea with its 
surges and its lightning might shatter the 
frail bark to splinters, rot it on the tusk of 
the reefs, or sink it to the fathomless abyss," 
and yet the rower walk like the disciple upon 
the waters. So it was the one white soul of 
Athens saw over his cup of hemlock, and be- 
yond his prison wall, a future and a God. 
So, in far later days Goethe, as well as Rich- 
ter, looking at the stars, said they must be 



(Bastzx lOae. 87 



the home of souls ; and great Agassiz sleep- 
ing yonder in New England, and great Car- 
lyle resting now in Old England, in still 
later years, held a clearer faith ; and so the 
Laureate sang, not for himself alone, but for 
the mighty world — 

" That nothing walks with aimless feet ; 
That not one life shall be destroyed, 
Or cast as rubbish in the void, 
When God hath made the pile complete." 

Therefore the voice of nature and the 
voice of history, the voice of science and 
the voice of humanity, blending with the 
voice of Heaven, chant this Easter morning 
even a stranger song — the strangest Easter 
anthem ever heard — for thus it runs : 

" Behold, I show you a mystery. 
We shall not all sleep, 
But we shall all be changed ; 
For this corruptible must put on incorruption, 
And this mortal must put on immortality. 
Then shall be brought to pass 
The saying that is written : 
Death is swallowed up in victory." 



Jmmortalttg, 



A solemn murmur in the soul 

Tells of the world to be, 
As travellers hear the billows roll 

Before they reach the sea. 

The soul, secured in her existence, smiles 
At the drawn dagger, and defies its point. 
The stars shall fade away, the sun himself 
Grow dim with age, and nature sink in years ; 
But thou s halt flourish in immortal youth, 
Unhurt amid the war of elements, 
The wreck of matter, and the crash of worlds. 

— Addison. 

3 am tlje resurrection, ano tlje life : \jt tbat bclicnftb in 
itlr, tbouflh be inert orao, net shall he line ano roboao- 
flpff linctij miii bclicnctb in i\U shall never bit. 

— S. John, xi. 25, 26. 



EASTER-TIDE. 




Jfmmattalitg. 

If a man die, shall he live again ? — Job, xiv. 14. 

IT was in the quiet autumn evening 
when his earthly life was drawing to 
its close that Daniel Webster said, 
" Thank God for that Gospel which brought 
life and immortality to light." It was the 
man who wrote the character of little Paul, 
who, watching the golden ripple on the wall 
and the coming of that old, old fashion, 
death, said, " Thank God, all who see it, for 
that older fashion yet of immortality." 

The question whether immortality is the 
passing dream of a tender heart, or an eternal 
reality great and sure as God Himself, rests 
with the answer you give to the question, " If 
a man die, shall he live again ? " For, to 
prove immortality, one does not need to show 
that the existence which follows human life 



92 Immortality. 



is everlasting. All the human soul asks is to 
be shown that there is any existence after 
that cold and rigid stillness called death. 

If by the resurrection of our Lord, or by 
the power of any other sufficient cause, it 
can be shown that our resurrection is an 
absolute certainty, then it requires no strain 
upon faith or even reason to hold that the 
raised life shall live forever ; for the life that 
can conquer but for a single day the leaden 
earthenness of death, the life that can but a 
single moment look down and hear the dull 
thuds of those clods which fall upon the 
wooden case about its own dead body, has 
nothing more to fear : it has crossed the dead 
line and escaped every shot that can possibly 
be fired ; it has reached the life of God, the 
life which, having had no beginning, cannot 
possibly have any ending. The only vital 
question then is not, Shall a man live forever, 
but, " If a man die, shall he live again?" even 
for one short day ? 

Job's question, therefore, even in this nar- 
row sense, is the one above all others of 
intense and awful interest. Other questions 
there have been of momentous importance in 



Itttmortfllitg. 93 



other times and other places and to other 
beings, but for man, none from out the great 
eternity of God of such tragic and tremen- 
dous moment as this one of the patriarch of 
Uz, " If a man die, shall he live again ? " 

We know that many have taught, no doubt 
with ideas of humility and reverence, that 
the only question of transcendent importance 
is the glory of God. But the glory of God is 
a calm and perfect certainty whether man 
come or go, whether he live for a season or 
die eternally. The attributes of God plainly 
show this is true. God is infinite. You go 
into the depths of the world, into hell itself, 
and God is there. You take the wings of the 
morning and go to the ends of the earth and 
the farthest limit of sea and mountain, and 
God is there. Your mind flies to the distant 
planet or to that sun whose light has been 
sweeping toward us for countless years, and 
God is there. You close your eyes, and with 
hand upon your tired head try to dream of 
some limit, some stopping-place ; but every 
point chosen necessarily supposes some infi- 
nite wall or space beyond, and at last your 
power of conception, your power of imagina- 



94 Jfntmortolit^. 



tion, however grand and brilliant, loses 
itself, or fearing to be swallowed up in the 
eternal billows of an infinite sea rushes back 
to your individuality hushed and abashed. 

Think for a moment also of the eternity of 
God. Time, the few centuries of the world, 
seem long to us ; Abraham standing in the 
gray dawn of history seems to us a dream of 
some Hebrew poet. But " before Abraham 
was," said the Divine One, " I am." The 
research of science has shown us in these 
later days that there have been not centuries 
simply, but unnumbered ages of growth and 
dissolution, then of growth again. But before 
all this was God. Before the tangled chaos of 
a universe, not to think of the void and dark- 
ness of an earth, before all these, was God. 
And if we attempt to form the future, the 
thought is just as futile, the conception is 
impossible. Yea, as it was in the beginning, 
is now, and ever shall be. Such is the glory 
of God, such is the wisdom, power, justice, 
holiness, and truth of a spiritual Being, who 
forever must, of necessity, be infinite, eternal, 
and unchangeable. We say, therefore, in all 
reverence, the one question above all others 



Immortality. 95 

in existence is not the glory of God, for that 
has been, is, and must forever be a fact, 
whether a man die eternally or whether he 
die and live again. 

Nor is the subject of death a question of 
any particular debate. The slow or sudden 
stoppage of existence, the narrowness, the 
incompleteness, the fragmentariness of life 
is a truth realized by all thinking persons. 
Toward the narrow door of death and the 
darkness beyond move all the millions of the 
race, nor does any one deny or hinder the 
fact. Little babe and aged patriarch, war- 
rior and civilian, society girl and housemaid, 
all are going the same way, down the Lenten 
road which at last comes to the Friday called 
Good. There is no dispute here nor gain- 
saying of that which is so beyond peradven- 
ture. Death, like the glory of God, is a 
calm, perfect, and inevitable certainty ; the 
only question is whether after Good Friday 
there is in reality for those who wait for it 
any meaning in the day called Easter. 

Neither is the important question of exist- 
ence one of this world or of this life. Some- 
times men try to make it seem so. While 



96 Jmmortalitrj. 

the blood flows easily and the heart has not 
been too often discouraged, while it is yet 
morning and the sun has neither scorched 
nor cast lengthening shadows over the land- 
scape, men may say life is enough. No one 
denies, either, that the world has its attrac- 
tions. A stately pageant indeed is the 
courtly world moving in grand procession ; 
heavy and costly are the folds of her sweep- 
ing train, hiding her sin and sorrow and 
squalor, a little gold but more tinsel, fair 
enough in the light of a society which only 
sins privately or respectably, but very worn 
and sallow and shallow in the light of a God 
who knoweth all things. For from out the 
great unknown, moves ever to cross and re- 
cross this worldly pageant that other proces- 
sion which cries, Earth to earth, ashes to 
ashes, dust to dust. Truly the world passeth 
away and the lust thereof. Man goeth to his 
long home, and the mourners go about the 
streets, and the only question of real interest 
still is this, " If a man die, shall he live 
again ? " 

Some in these latter times have tried to 
comfort us with what they called a corporate 



Immortality. 97 

immortality ; that is, an immortality of a cer- 
tain age or nation or family, and not of the 
individual. This is all well enough to dream 
about : it sounds self-denying, even heroic, to 
let one's personality be used for the filling up 
and levelling, so to speak, of the nineteenth 
century ; but it is so uncomfortably like one's 
own funeral, that, to say the least, it is not a 
cheerful thought. Most men are, no doubt, 
willing to give their portion toward bolster- 
ing up a lame and impotent age — one-tenth, 
say, or one- fifth even ; but to give up and 
deny one's own personal immortality for the 
mere fame of America, Alaska, or any other 
place as an aggregate, is a theory suitable 
for some insane supralapsarian, but is not 
adapted to the ordinary demand of the human 
heart. The question with each man still is 
this : " If / die, shall I live again ? " Shall 
I live again, — that is it, — for in all God's uni- 
verse there is no more inconceivably awful 
thought than annihilation. Purgatory, hell — 
these ideas are nothing compared to the 
belief that we are to drown eternally, in a sea 
which can never give up its dead, the elo- 
quence of Demosthenes, Cicero, and Mira- 
7 



Immortality. 



beau ; to forget forever the thoughts of 
Homer and Dante, Milton and Shakespeare ; 
to hush everlastingly the music of Mozart 
and Beethoven, Mendelssohn and Wagner ; 
to cloud the thoughts of Raphael, Titian, and 
Murillo ; to pommel into dust the marble life 
of Phidias, Angelo, and Thorwaldsen ; to dis- 
cord the chant of the Psalms, the oratorios 
of Isaiah, the nocturnes of Ezekiel, the carols 
of the Evangelists, the requiem and glorias of 
the Revelation ; to blot out in shame and 
sham, in ignominy and deception, never be- 
fore or after equalled, to blot out and blast 
every line of that Divine character Who 
said, " I am the resurrection and the life : 
whosoever believeth in Me hath everlasting 
life, and I will raise him up at the last day." 
Surely, if the dead rise not, and we are 
never again to see the glory of the autumn 
sky, nor hear again the soft music of the 
summer wind, nor feel the balmy fragrance of 
the dying spring-time, then we are never to 
hope again, never to work again, never to 
love again. Truly, great apostle, if this be the 
end of all, then are we men most miserable. 
If for the cry of the human heart there re- 



Smtnortalitn. 99 

mains but chaos and disintegrating ruin, then 
let us say with Coleridge : 

" Be sad, be glad, be neither ! seek nor shun ! 
Thou hast no reason why : Thou canst have none. 
Thy being's being is contradiction." 

After all, if the present be satisfied, what 
does the world care what becomes of the 
future ? " Cannot a man be happy and yet 
believe in nothing ? " Yes, as an infant is 
happy ; a babe has no appreciation of the 
mighty past, or the majestic glory of the 
eternal future. All the baby asks is to be fed 
and to be amused and not to have its sleep 
too abruptly broken. It is quite as content 
to play in the mud as on a velvet carpet ; it 
neither reads nor thinks nor speaks any sense 
till many days have been added to its exist- 
ence ; the dim memory of transient pain may 
keep it out of the fire, but it has no real idea 
of danger or of responsibility. Call such a 
being happy, if you please, but in grade and 
comparison with mature and certain faith in 
immortality, it is but the happiness of the rich 
man's horse. The rich man's horse stands in 
his padded stall ; he is fed and groomed, har- 



Jmmortalitf). 



nessed and driven, while youth allows him to 
remain handsome and spirited, and fashion 
has not decreed his mane and tail must have 
another length. After that he is sold to the 
poor man, and dies halt and broken, a poor 
man's horse. Happy is the rich man's horse 
we will admit, because he does not know or 
trouble about his future ; but his happiness is 
a kind not worth the dead weeds on which 
dies the poor man's horse, the horse that 
once was rich. 

Now, suppose a man is moved to stir him- 
self out of his child-life, or out of his mere 
animal existence, and seriously to meditate 
upon life's great question, " If a man die, 
shall he live again?" it is remarkable how 
many objections he will allow to have weight 
with him which really ought not to have any 
force at all. 

Let but one be named. Men say, for in- 
stance, that they cannot believe in immor- 
tality, because it is something they cannot 
grasp or comprehend. How strange an ex- 
cuse is this when we consider that compara- 
tively nothing can be understood when traced 
back to its ultimate cause. Life itself — who 



Immortality. 101 

can say what it is ? It is not the bones, or 
the muscles, or the nerves, or the physical 
identity ; back within these there runs a mys- 
terious something called will, mind, or spirit, 
and no one knows what that is or how it 
acts upon and controls the body. No one 
knows mathematically, absolutely, whence it 
came or whither it is going, and yet all men 
believe in life. They believe in that which 
they can neither explain nor comprehend. 
To any one who has studied astronomy, or 
indeed any science, there come moments when 
the immensity of facts to be handled can but 
fill with solemn awe. The unnumbered 
worlds sweeping with incalculable speed 
through the infinite space about suns that are 
moving themselves around some unknown 
satellites ; stars coming and going no one 
knows whither, — all these are facts com- 
monly admitted, but not mathematically 
proven nor understood by one in ten thou- 
sand believing the same. We need not go so 
far away. Take the facts and use of electri- 
city. What is it ? No man can say, but no 
sane man denies it. What is light ? No one 
knows, but every one believes in light. What 



102 Jmmortalitg. 

is the power opposite to the power of gravita- 
tion ? No one knows, yet there is some such 
force. 

It comes to this, then, that heaven and 
earth are full of facts beyond our comprehen- 
sion, but none the less facts for that. It 
becomes, therefore, worthy of remark, that 
immortality is beyond all ordinary earthly 
evidences, for the reason that it sweeps be- 
yond all that is merely human and mortal, 
beyond all that is earthly. In certain parts 
of the ocean the waters are unfathomable ; the 
heavy lead, though it strike no bottom, stands 
as it were in mid-air. Science has shown 
that beyond a certain depth nothing has been 
ever known to go ; the heaviest metal will, 
because of the density of the waters, stand at 
that line. What, how far it is beyond that 
line, God, He alone, knows ; but that there is 
a beyond, a sweep of water deeper and far- 
ther reaching than the still line of the gray 
old ocean, is a fact no intelligent man denies. 
In the same way, beyond all human ken, 
sweeps this solemn, grand, and awful fact of 
immortality. No man has ever measured 
this eternalness, because it cannot be meas- 



Jmrnortalitrj. 103 

ured ; no man has strictly, literally speak- 
ing, ever proven the existence of this immor- 
tality, because it is a fact not to be sized by 
feet and inches, by days and hours, or by 
metres and millimetres. He, then, who denies 
this immortality because it is something not 
to be enveloped in the hollow of the human 
hand, is like the man who says there is no 
North Pole, because no exploring party has 
ever reached that unknown region. He is 
like the man who tells us the highest moun- 
tains have no top, because no man has ever 
reached those lofty summits. He is like the 
men who deny the centre of Africa, because 
no bold and powerful traveller has as yet re- 
turned from the depths of that Dark Conti- 
nent. 

It is no proof, then, against immortality that 
a man cannot reduce his proof for it to a 
syllogism, to an algebraic axiom. The child 
that is to be born to-morrow surely knows 
nothing of the life into which it is about 
to enter, but it will certainly be born and 
will certainly live : so a man will pass at 
death into another life, though to-day he 
cannot give the least positive evidence of that 



104 JhnmcrrtalitB. 

after life. Those who have visited Niagara 
will remember the lovely rainbow which 
spans the falls, a bridge of heavenly colors, 
but the waters which reflect that rainbow are 
forever changing. Some day when the waters 
have worn the rocks of Niagara down, the 
rainbow will disappear from human sight, but 
not from God's sight, for the rich and exqui- 
site color of that bow came not from the 
changing waters, but from that sun which will 
shine when human life has become extinct. 
And some day when the color of your face, the 
light of your eye, and the well-known look of 
your features have become a blank because 
of the falling, dying body, you will not be 
dead. The light of God called life, which 
for a little shone from your body, will but 
have returned to that Sun, to that Eternal 
Light, from whence in the beginning it came 
forth. Of this was Wordsworth thinking 
when he said ; 

" There shines through our earthly dresse 
Bright shoots of everlasting-nesse." 

So passes from human sight the most 
popular objection of modern unbelief, — the 



Immortality. 105 

objection that we are not to believe what we 
cannot analytically understand. 

In proportion as such objections are weak 
you find the positive evidences for immortal- 
ity cogent and powerful. The one evidence 
above all others is the resurrection of our 
Lord. We cannot present the proofs for the 
resurrection in the space and time allowed us. 
It is sufficient for our present purpose merely 
to recall that the evidences for the resurrec- 
tion are the most conclusive of any fact in 
ancient history. If what are commonly 
called Christian evidences are ruled out of 
court, then with the sweep of your hand you 
can wipe out all history. Classic literature is 
but a myth, mediaeval life but a vision, the 
Crusades an hallucination, and the Reforma- 
tion but a Canterbury tale. Deny as unan- 
swerable the Christian evidences, and the 
martyrs are but a dream, the saints but men- 
tal rhapsodies, the sacred wars but vapors 
and vagaries, and the historic Church but a 
romance mingled with " such stuff as dreams 
are made of." 

We do not say that these evidences, how- 
ever unanswerable, however cogent, insure 



io6 Immortality . 



faith or belief in a life to come : far from 
it. Faith is a gift of God, to be had by 
those who ask for it, and who use the 
means of grace He has appointed. It is a 
matter of willing will, for no man can be 
convinced against his will ; it is a matter of 
character, for unless a man earnestly wish to 
fulfil his duty and serve God, no evidence 
possible can give him faith. Angels and 
archangels could not make a blind, prejudiced 
man see a world as large as Jupiter. It was 
true in the past, it must forever be true, of the 
man who daily and deliberately sins, that 
such a man would not be persuaded though 
one rose from the dead. 

From what has been said, let no one, how- 
ever, be led to think disparagingly of those 
logical and historical facts which carry before 
them an intellectual but not necessarily a 
spiritual assent to the truth. When in the 
goodness of God faith has been given us, 
these evidences are very helpful to strengthen 
and confirm this faith ; so helpful are they 
that it is the duty of all good Christians to 
study these evidences, and not be the reli- 
gious sciolists so many people allow them- 



Immortality. 107 



selves not only to be, but to remain. Blown 
about by every wind of doctrine are these 
poor people, not having an answer to give for 
the reason of the hope that is in them. So 
helpful are these evidences that we venture 
to recall some mental states of being, not so 
ordinarily adduced as arguments for a life to 
come. 

The very desire itself for immortality is a 
proof of its coming fulfilment. All other 
desires of mind, body, and soul have been 
gratified in some degree. God has given 
food and drink for the body, colors for the 
eye, melody for the ear, the flower and all 
redolence for the scent, the delicacy for the 
taste, the sensitive skin for the touch, canvas 
and all nature for the painter, the marble for 
the sculptor, music for the artist, the waving 
field for the farmer, and the cattle upon the 
hills for the herdsman. In this way we 
might go on through all desires, through all 
passions, whether love or friendship, ambition 
or emulation, and we would find for each 
some gratification. God in His mercy may 
not always give us all that for which we pray, 
because, like children, we often ask for what 



108 Smtnortalitn. 

would do us harm, nor do we attempt to 
explain why some never get their desire. 
God knows best, not we ; but this only is 
certainly true, that for every wish, want, or 
appetite there is some gratification if it be 
best for us. 

It would be a most strange and inexplaina- 
ble phenomenon if this desire for immortality, 
a desire old and deep as mankind, a desire 
universal as humanity, a desire more divine 
and God-like than all other, — it would, we say, 
be strange and utterly inexplicable if such a 
desire was never to be answered, such an 
ambition never to be gained, such a holy and 
reverent hope never to be fulfilled. Dream- 
ing this truth was Tennyson when he wrote : 

" My own dim life shall teach me this, 
That life shall live for evermore, 
Else earth is darkness at the core, 
And dust and ashes all that is." 

Another great intimation of a life to come 
lies in the instinctive feeling of mankind that 
virtue and mercy ought to be rewarded and 
cruelty and murder punished. When some 
terrible crime sends through the community 



Immortality. 109 

a thrill of horror, men say without stopping 
to argue or debate, " If there be a just God, 
this vile, damnable deed will surely be pun- 
ished ; " but, as we sadly know, such deeds 
are not always, if ever, punished in this life. 
If there be a God, then there must be a 
life hereafter to level down the wicked and 
to level up the good, for the grand and 
heroic full often get not a penny's worth 
of reward in this vale of misery and contra- 
diction. 

There is another pledge and earnest of our 
immortality in the fact of our origin. St. 
Paul quoting the heathen said, " Even your 
own poet has written, 'We are God's off- 
spring.' " We came out from God in the 
belief of all intelligent nations ; is it not most 
natural to suppose we shall return to Him ? It 
is not forgotten that in these times some have 
taught that we were evolved from monkeys 
of high and low degree, from tadpoles and 
other frog spawn. This belief needs no other 
answer than the severe but deserved hand- 
ling which Carlyle gave it. It needs no 
other answer than that universal feeling of 
humanity, saying with Wordsworth : 



Smmortalitt). 



" The soul that rises with us, our life star, 
Hath had elsewhere its setting, 
And cometh from afar ; 
Not in entire forgetfulness, 
And not in utter nakedness, 
But trailing clouds of glory do we come, 
From God, who is our home." 

Surely these words are true, and there can 
be nothing more probable than that the God 
who gave us birth, who breathed into our 
nostrils the breath of life, in whose Divine 
image we were made, surely this holy God if 
we wish it, if we ask it will not allow our 
life to be destroyed, 

" Or cast as rubbish to the void 
When He hath made the pile complete." 

Consider another proof of immortality. It 
is a subtle evidence, full of strangeness and 
mystery, but none the less a most forcible 
evidence. It is the indescribable, inexpressi- 
ble feeling that sometimes comes to any life 
of any depth when under certain excitements. 
A woman feels it when suddenly the love of 
her life lies dead ; a man feels it going into 
battle. It is the enthusiasm which follows 



Jmntortalitg. 1 1 1 

the pale shiver of the first fear of actual con- 
flict. An ordinary life may feel it under the 
mystic magnetism of eloquent oratory, or 
when under the charm of magnificent music. 
Any one may feel it when in a room alone 
with a dead body, or when going through a 
churchyard at sunset or at night. It is the 
voice of the absent, it is the breath of our 
good angel, it is the intimation of our Immor- 
tality. 

It is not unknown that all which has been 
said is denied by many. Men often hope 
by denying a hereafter to feel easier in the 
license they have taken to commit sin and 
crime. They hope by denying God to get 
away from the mysterious and inexplainable ; 
but when a man denies God and the life to 
come, he increases the mystery and contra- 
diction tenfold. It is easier to suppose that 
the broken type which have been pitched 
into the printer's hell, will strike off of them- 
selves some grand epic poem, than it is to 
presume that this world came by chance. It 
is easier to suppose, all things considered, 
that the past was but the fancy of a fool, than 
that the future of the human race and of all 



ii2 StntnortalitB. 



God's universe is to end in confused nothing- 
ness. Our daily life is a daily miracle, yet 
men go up and down the land complaining 
about the improbability and the impossibil- 
ity of the miraculous. They want a God 
and religion of reason, they say, and they 
mean by reason what their small minds can 
measure. A pretty God these men could give 
the world, — a God of humanity, as they call 
Him, who would chop wood and plough the 
fields ; a God who would ask men's advice, 
and attend the Concord School of Philoso- 
phy ; a God of whom it must be said in the 
withering satire of Elijah, " Pray louder, for 
he is a God : either he is talking or he is 
pursuing, or he is on a journey, or peradven- 
ture he sleepeth and must be awakened." 

Far different from the tone of the men 
whom Elijah so effectively obliterated, was 
the spirit of those characters in history who 
were truly great. The thinkers who claim 
that independence and transcendence of 
mind which will not allow them to herd 
intellectually with women and children seem 
never to have heard of Isaiah and Saint 
Paul, or to have read Dante and Shake- 



Immortality. 113 



speare, or to have known Webster and 
Lincoln, Wellington and Washington, or to 
have heard of Bacon and Galileo, O'Connell 
and Burke, Raphael and Angelo, Marco 
Polo and Columbus, Mozart and Beethoven, 
Thorwaldsen and Millet, Irving and Thack- 
eray, Louise of Germany, Louis IX. of 
France, and Albert of England. These 
souls that towered so high above the plane 
of ordinary humanity were Christians, all of 
them, and believers in immortality. It would 
be an interesting thing also to know whether 
the so-called liberal thinkers ever read or 
heard of that Emerson whom they so much 
profess to admire ; for it was he who said, 
" We carry the pledge of immortality in our 
breast ; " it was he who, to a cultured Boston 
audience, said that " the logic of modern 
infidelity could only be compared to the 
slaughter-house style of thinking." In these 
very words did the New England apostle of 
" liberal theology " slay with the jaw-bone 
of an ass the Philistine hosts of u new and 
broad thought." So indeed passeth the 
glory of the world. 

Therefore, with men who have nothing new, 



1 14 Immortality. 

only that which is old and tried, only that 
Faith once delivered to the saints, we who 
are Churchmen take our stand for life or for 
death, and when you ask us, " If a man die, 
shall he live again ? " we answer in the name 
of fiction and poetry, in the name of elo- 
quence and philosophy, in the name of art 
and discovery, in the name of science and 
religion, in the name of instinct which cries 
to Heaven, and conscience which never lies, 
in the name of humanity which waits, and in 
the name of the Creator who will keep His 
word : 

u I believe in God the Father Almighty, 
and in Jesus Christ His only Son our Lord ; 
I believe in the Holy Ghost, the Holy Cath- 
olic Church, the Communion of Saints, the 
Forgiveness of Sins, the Resurrection of the 
Body, and the Life Everlasting, Amen." 



Ei)t 4tf)urrf) rtf &mraca< 



%i)C6c tt)ou0t)t0 upon \\)t ttburcfc of America 3 bfbicatr 
to Ijtrn rol)o was mn /atljer in tlje /aitlj, ©eorge irnnklin 
£cnmour, <&.€.!»., iTiF.D., Bishop of .Sprinflfielo— tlje 
Stsljop tobo tauflljt mc to rrparb \\)c $000 of all ages, anb 
to steh ttje trull) of all parties. 

Note. — This sermon was delivered in St. Pauls 
Church, Alton, Illinois, before the Very Rev. Dean 
and the Rev. Clergy of the Deanery of Litchfield. It 
was the intention of the speaker to review certain 
special dangers which characterize the present age, and 
to assume as known those awful forces ever against 
the earthly Church, comprehended in the phrase, " the 
world, the flesh, and the devil." If the author spoke 
disparagingly of the English Church of the eighteenth 
century, it was not because he failed to appreciate the 
grandeur of Her present position or the true nobility 
of those many faithful men who to-day labor in Her 
midst. 



&ty (Simrri) jrf America. 

The Forces against it. The Facts 
for IT. 

The Church of God which He hath purchased with 
His own blood. — The Acts of the Apostles, xx. 28. 



f|?&|HE vital question which early Chris- 
|gSK tianity settled was, "Who and what 
*sEBM is Christ ? " The cardinal issue of 
modern Christianity is, " Where and what is 
the Church ? " 

Some, whose religion is purely subjective 
and idealistic, say that our words and medita- 
tions at all times dwell upon " the Church," 
and that alone. They go so far as to say 
that we make the Church everything and 
Christ nothing, as if one could, even if they 
wished, meditate upon the Church, which is 
the very Body of Christ, that which He pur- 
chased with His own blood ; as if one could 
do this and not think of Christ Himself. 
This well-known cavil of Churchmen " ever- 



t)£ (Etjnrclj of America. 



lastingly talking Church," borders upon the 
amusing when we consider the source of this 
captious fallacy, for the people who cry, " The 
Bible, the Bible, the religion of Protestants," 
must have read their Bible with both eyes 
closed, or they would have seen that God's 
Word is but the history of the Church, a reve- 
lation of the coming Church, and that this rev- 
elation knows of no other than " the Church," 
which is one family in heaven and earth. Never 
a word in all its pages about the Methodist, or 
the Presbyterian, or even the Protestant Epis- 
copal Church — never a word about " my " 
Church or even " our" Church. A few sen- 
tences, not very complimentary as you know, . 
concerning the Amorites, and Hittites, and 
Canaanites, but not so much as a word con- 
cerning the four hundred and thirty ites and 
isms to which modern times have given rise. 
Rather the history of the long centuries be- 
fore Christ was the story of the Church only, 
— a Church, by the way, gorgeously and mag- 
nificently ritualistic ; a Church where Christ 
and His apostles worshipped without com- 
plaint or prejudice. When a man was to be 
reproved, the Blessed Lord said tell it, not to 



&t)e Cljmrri) of America. 119 

the Wesleyans, nor to the Lutherans, nor to 
the Presbyterians, nor even to the " Episco- 
palians," but tell it to " the Church,'* and if 
he refuse to hear the Church, let him be unto 
you as a heathen man and a publican. And 
St. Paul said, not Calvinism nor any other 
ism, but the Church of God, which He pur- 
chased with His own blood ; and the same 
great apostle turned suddenly upon the Cor- 
inthians and said, as he saw rising the spirit 
of envy, strife, and division — he turned and 
said, Who is Paul, who is Apollos, who is Ce- 
phas ? Were you baptized in these names ? 
And the loved disciple, beholding from off 
Patmos visions which no human language 
could picture, sketches in outline, in Raphael 
cartoons, a new Jerusalem, a multitude no 
man could number, a chorus of angelic har- 
mony, a worship of such transcendent splen- 
dor that cherubim and seraphim veiled their 
faces. A heavenly vision was this Apocalypse 
of the Church, and not the mere dream of a 
human society held together to-day by taste 
and congenial likings, and to-morrow torn to 
pieces by hate and prejudice and the power 
of a godless private opinion. 



120 f&ije OTtjttrct) of <3ttnerica. 

The last forty days the Divine One spent 
upon earth were passed, it is written, in 
H speaking of the things pertaining to the 
Kingdom of God." To say that the " King- 
dom of God " and " Kingdom of Heaven," 
terms so often used by the Blessed Lord, 
refer simply to the Church invisible, is impos- 
sible, for such parables as those of the fishes, 
the wheat and the tares, plainly show that in 
this Kingdom of Heaven is found the evil 
with the good ; but no body of respectable 
men ever yet has held that the Church at 
Rest or Triumphant is to be denied with evil. 
The last forty days, then, — and surely there 
have been none in history more solemn, — were 
spent in speaking of the earthly Church. 

So one could go on and show that from 
first to last the Bible is the inspired narrative 
of a Church, a Church not rent into a thou- 
sand fragments ; but a Church of one Lord, 
one Faith, one Baptism — not a body of so- 
called churches, with five hundred Lords, 
four hundred faiths, and three hundred sac- 
raments. 

What is true of the Bible is true of history. 
History for fifteen hundred years knows of 



&t)£ Qnjttrri) of America. 121 

none other than the one Holy Catholic and 
Apostolic Church. It follows, then, that 
either there was no Church for fifteen centu- 
ries, and the gates of hell had prevailed 
against it, or the multitude of societies 
which have risen in later times, and which 
are called after human names, are not the 
Church. These facts are also true of the 
Prayer Book. A printer, by no official author- 
ity, tacked upon its title-page a strange, neg- 
ative, ambiguous name ; but Creed and 
Prayer within its pages speak only of The or 
Thy Church, and by the side of the body 
from which the spirit is departing it prays 
that when we have served God in our gen- 
eration, " we may be gathered unto our 
fathers, having the testimony of a good con- 
science, in the Communion of the Catholic 
Church." He, then, who cavils about our 
reverence for the Church, the Body of Christ, 
condemns not only us, but Prayer Book, 
Church History, and Holy Scripture. 

That the Communion of which we are 
members is finally to be in every sense " the 
Church " of America, there is no doubt in the 
mind of the speaker, whatever be the mind 



122 &l)£ (El)ttrcl) of America. 

of his listeners. The day, however, when 
that triumphant time is finally to come, 
depends upon the haste and thoroughness 
with which we realize the cause of our weak- 
ness, the violence of our prejudices, and the 
power of our mission and authority, when 
broadly and grandly used. 

That the apostle who described the 
Church of Christ as " the Church of God 
which He hath purchased with His own 
Blood," foresaw dangers in every age, is 
plainly shown from the verses which follow. 
" For I know this, that after my departing 
grievous wolves shall enter in among you, 
not sparing the flock. Also of your own 
selves shall men arise, speaking perverse 
things, to draw away disciples after them." 

Sometimes when we clearly understand a 
difficulty we know best how to meet it. 
When we can see and measure an obstruc- 
tion, we can more easily and hastily remove 
it. Perhaps the largest mountain which 
blocks our path and blinds our vision is the 
fact that this is an age of dense ecclesiastical 
ignorance. The very limited number of par- 
ish schools, the lack of personal instruction 



QLtyt (Etjarct) of America. 123 

by the priest, — which has been replaced in so 
many cases by the superficial surface teaching 
of Sunday schools, — and the rash irreverence 
of parts of Protestantism which would have 
you " come to Jesus " with your hat on, are 
responsible for much of this sciolism of the 
day. If it is true that a large part of the 
mass cannot name the thirteen original States, 
it is more true that the vast majority know 
nothing concerning the Fathers of the undi- 
vided Church, not to speak of its undisputed 
Councils. If it is true that a large part of 
the nation has never read its Constitution, its 
Declaration, or the Farewell Address, it is 
more true that vast numbers cannot give the 
biblical reasons for their own confirmation, 
or the barest synopsis of English Church 
history. If it is true that the majority do 
not know why the wind blows, it is more true 
that they cannot give the few unanswerable 
arguments which prove the existence of a 
personal God. Brilliant and wonderful 
beyond comparison is the day in literature 
and invention, and in " science falsely so 
called ; " but " dark " unto blackness must 
have been those past " ages," if they knew 



124 &l)£ Cljttrcl) of America. 

less than these times concerning " those 
things which a Christian ought to know and 
believe to his soul's health," or were less able 
to obey the apostle, and give answer to any- 
one who asketh a reason for the faith in them. 
Out of this state of things grows the fact 
that a vast number of the Church in Amer- 
ica are ignorant of their own great inheri- 
tance. Hurried into the Church without 
proper instruction, fed afterwards with an 
endless number of sermons which they neither 
remembered nor followed, fed with little else 
than this, these people grew up to look upon 
the Church as one of the many religious 
societies, to be preferred for its gentility, 
its wealth and aristocracy, but for nothing 
higher. Into a sadder mistake no body of 
Christians could possibly fall. The story of 
history and fiction repeats itself. There was 
a prince once, you remember, who, when a 
child, was cast into humble life. Through 
long years he toiled and suffered and starved, 
never knowing or dreaming of the throne 
which awaited him. One day, when his life 
was far spent, they came and told him of his 
inheritance, but he laughed them to scorn, 



&t)£ Ctjttrrl) of America. 125 

— said he was a peasant and gloried in the 
fact ; that he did not believe them, but that 
if he did he would not occupy a position 
so many had disgraced. So, poor, starved, 
alone, of his own free will, he died. In like 
manner there are thousands of men in the 
Church of America who will live and die in 
the narrow limits of their own poor igno- 
rance and prejudice, refusing to believe that 
the Church is other than one of many poor, 
wretched sects, which come and go as the 
trees, in a century. That the Church of 
America is part of the very Church Christ 
founded on earth, the Church of the historic 
Creeds and Councils, the Church of the 
Apostles, Prophets, and Martyrs, the Church 
of the Saints, Hermits, and Confessors, the 
Church of history as well as Scripture, is a 
fact these poor people will deny — against 
which they will even fight. Out of such a 
condition of affairs has grown the fact, that, 
until of late years, the American Church has 
refused to recognize some of her greatest 
and most faithful sons. Not half a century 
since, in words sad as they were true and 
terrible, John Henry Newman told the 



126 fftl)* Cljtircl) of America. 

Church of England that she had forgotten 
the fair face and character of her own chil- 
dren. And who shall say that, for an hun- 
dred years at least, it was not our lot to follow 
in the footsteps of the Mother Church ? 

This lack of historical and biblical knowl- 
edge led to that worship of modern antiquity 
which is so very prevalent. You hear people 
quite constantly apotheosizing " the good old 
times," and deprecating present times and 
present manners. Now, if these people mean 
by old times the real old times, then, in many 
things, they are right. Research shows 
among the ruins of long-lost cities evidences 
of useful and ornamental art which are still 
among the lost arts. And, in the religious 
world, we hope to find and restore some lost 
arts. We find, for instance, in the good old 
Jewish times that people sometimes walked 
an hundred miles to worship God in His 
consecrated house — not simply to hear the 
sermon or the singing of the choir. We 
find that Church full of white-robed choris- 
ters and priests ; never do we read in all the 
Bible of black-coated ministers or quartette 
choirs. We find in that Church a reverence 



&l)£ Cljurri) of America. 127 

which if violated brought death. We find 
daily offered, amid the light of altar tapers, 
the sweet scent of rising incense and chant- 
ing of the priests, the foreshadowing of a 
great sacrifice. We find that Christ we wor- 
ship and His inspired apostles going long 
journeys to worship in that very temple 
where were daily carried on what some people 
would now call " ritualistic practices." If 
we pass to the good old Christian times, we 
find still in every part of the Christian Church 
those very customs and ceremonies which 
some people say " were not in the good old 
times." And this statement is made, we fear, 
not so much to admire with reverence and 
humility the past, as to condemn, in their 
judgment, the present. But how sad is the 
day if the Church of God, that Church 
which is the infinite and eternal Body of 
Christ, is to be narrowed down or cramped 
within the prejudices and within the poor 
miserable ritual of any one parish or diocese, 
past, present, or future. 

What has this modern past done for us, 
when we come to look at it calmly ? The 
dear Mother Church, as the Church of Eng- 



128 f&tyt (Hljttrrl) of America. 

land is so often called, would not, because 
of State and Church relations, give us a 
bishop, until, less than a hundred years ago, 
the many children of the Church, having 
no shepherd, wandered away from the fold. 
Then, because of the leaden lethargy of its 
members, it drove not Wesley, but his earnest- 
hearted followers from the Church. Had 
the English Church of a century ago allowed 
the methods of work she now allows, all that 
great body of active Christians commonly 
called Methodists would to-day be with us. 
Only fifty years ago the prejudice, bitterness, 
and unbridled tongues of men in the English 
Church drove John Henry Newman and 
nearly one hundred and fifty other priests 
into the fold of Rome. It is most natural 
that the early American Church should have 
imbibed some of the lameness, the indolent 
arrogance, and the astounding irreverence 
which characterized the English Church of 
the eighteenth century. The early history of 
the American Church, even that part which 
many men now remember, is not, then, in all 
its particulars, the best pattern for an ideal 
model. Many now living remember certain 



fttje (Etjnrcli of America. 129 

parishes where the baptismal font held the 
dripping umbrellas ; where men stood in the 
House of God with hats on, or, if they took 
them off, put them on any convenient place, 
the font or the lectern. Many remember the 
feast of peanuts, laughter and flirtation the 
quartette choir had in the high gallery in 
the midst of service, or the happier time the 
sheep and the cattle had in the churchyard 
because of broken fences and general negli- 
gence ; and there are those still living who 
remember the black gown, that dear old sym- 
bol of John Calvin, of sin, Satan and death. 
Now it is a very easily explained fact that 
since the churches of England and America 
have begun to restore the real old service 
and reverence of the Church Catholic, 
there has been a grand and enthusiastic re- 
vival, and that the last score of years has 
witnessed a growth and prosperity which 
even the religious bodies about admit is mar- 
vellous. Thank God, the Church of to-day 
has room enough for men of all opinions and 
parties, be they broad as humanity, low as 
the human heart, or high as God's heaven ; 
but he who runs may read this fact, that 
9 



130 %ft\t dottrel) 0f &tnmca. 

humanity is drifting in but two directions, 
and those directions are neither toward Ro- 
manism nor toward Protestantism, but toward 
infidelity on one side and toward biblical 
and historical Catholicism on the other. 
Against every advance, from the steamboat 
to the steam-thresher, has modern prejudice 
been arrayed ; but with the majestic march 
of a higher civilization which sweeps calmly 
over all smaller things, moves also that 
Church which looks forward and upward, the 
Church of choir-boys and sisterhoods and 
brotherhoods, the Church which pleads to 
God daily, through the grandest service that 
human hands and human hearts can offer, the 
one and sufficient Sacrifice of Calvary ; that 
Church which reverences the past customs, 
not only of fifty years ago, but of five hundred 
years, of fifteen hundred years, of twice fifteen 
hundred years ago. 

In contrast with what can but be termed 
ancestor worship, has risen the very opposite 
error, — that is, the constant cry of Progress. 
They tell us that everything else has im- 
proved, so you must improve the Church ; 
all else has changed, they say, you must 



©I)* Ctjnrct) of 2Lmmcci. 131 

change the Church to suit the latest mode or 
school of thought. But there is such a thing 
as a change for the worse. It was the man 
who came nearest to inspiration who told us 
that it was wasteful as well as ridiculous to 
gild refined gold, to paint the lily, to throw 
perfume on a violet, to smooth the ice, to 
add another hue to the rainbow, or to seek 
to garnish the eye of Heaven with a candle. 
In other words, so-called progress, in some 
directions, is an evil ; it is trying to make a 
square squarer, a circle rounder ; it is adding 
another note to the scale, and thereby form- 
ing a discord. Nowhere is this fact more 
certain than in the Church of God. The 
Church is the Body of Christ. You cannot 
improve upon that by any change, human or 
divine. Romanism has added to that Body 
— sometimes almost buried it ; Protestantism 
has taken from that Body. Romanism and 
Protestantism have, then, both alike tried to 
change, to improve, to progress upon the 
divine Body of Christ, and, therefore, must 
stand at last with those who have placed 
upon our Lord a cross or with those who 
robbed Him of His raiment. 



132 &t)£ (Eljttrcl) 0f America. 

Along with the cry that this is an age of 
change and progress, has been heard also the 
cry that this is an age of charity, that it 
is an age of liberty of thought, unshackled 
by religious oppression, an age of " sublime 
charity." But much of it is a pseudo charity ; 
a charity which is not liberty, but license ; 
a charity which covers a multitude of sins. 
When the rabble divides your home, robs 
you of your property, turns the ground where 
rest the bodies of your dead into a race- 
course, desecrates all that is dear and sacred 
to your heart, you do not sit quietly at home 
and say such people have a right to do and 
think as they please — this is an age of charity. 
Neither can a devout Churchman see all the 
moral law mocked, the very and only Body 
of Christ rent into fragments by Protestant- 
ism, vilified by infidelity, or sepulchred by 
Romanism, and hold his silence ; for if he 
were coward, or craven, or dreamer enough 
to be deceived by such a sham charity, if at 
such a time he were to hold his peace, the 
very stones would cry out. Faith, hope and 
charity, and the greatest of these is char- 
ity ; but no charity since the world began 



&!)£ (Eljtxrcl) of America. 133 

ever made right wrong or wrong right. As 
Churchmen we have, therefore, to meet and 
to battle with an age which covers and per- 
mits a vast amount of evil under the broad 
sounding name of charity. 

The Church has to contend also with an 
age of most violent prejudice. In no direc- 
tion is the unreasonable animosity of the 
day more quickly seen than in the hatred 
of a Protestant for anything that he thinks 
savors of the Church of Rome. That the 
Romanist has fed the hungry, clothed the 
naked, and visited the sick, is nothing to a 
Protestant ; his ire against the papal obedi- 
ence has settled into an hereditary hate. 
The instinctive antipathy of animals is some- 
thing very remarkable. The rat will leave 
a neighborhood where a ferret has simply 
walked ; an ox, from calfhood up to respected 
old age, will hook at a dog. The scientific 
solution of this is, that when the ox was an 
urus and the dog a starving wolf, they met 
only in mortal fray, and this protective an- 
tagonism has been inherited. You might 
explain to the ox all day, if you had the 
time, that the dog passing through his field 



134 &t)£ (Etjnrcl) of America. 

had no wish to disturb his peace, but could 
he speak he would say, " He is a dog ; that is 
enough. Give me a chance and I will hook 
him." In like manner the respective animals 
of Rome and Wittenberg regard each other. 
The Roman dog looks upon the Protestant 
ox as a harmless, good-for-nothing sort of an 
animal, and never notices him unless run at ; 
then he dodges his horns, stops a while to 
bark and worry him, enjoys this thing im- 
mensely, and then slips under his ecclesiasti- 
cal fence and follows his master the pope, 
saying, by his general appearance, " What a 
foolish old animal that Protestant ox is, any- 
way ! " 

That the Roman Church has in it grievous 
error, no one outside of its own communion 
denies. Yet we know of no error in Rome 
as great as the common Protestant heresy, 
that any man can form a society and call 
it a Church, and that these innumerable 
"churches " can go on increasing and array- 
ing themselves against each other and still 
be the Body of Christ on earth. No error 
since the world began was ever greater or 
more grievous than that, and it is but natural 



®t)£ djurct) of &tnmca. 135 

if at last all Protestantism resolve itself into 
its logical conclusion, — a vast negative, with 
nothing positive about it except its preju- 
dice. 

Violent, indeed, has been this protesting 
spirit in all ages, as when it called Christ 
a devil, a friend of publicans and sinners, a 
glutton and a wine-bibber. 

Therefore, against such forces as these, the 
spirit of ignorance and the spirit of preju- 
dice, the spirit of false charity, the spirit of 
false progress, and the spirit of ancestor wor- 
ship, — against these, which are the modern 
gates of hell, must the Church battle ; against 
them, as the Lord has promised, she will pre- 
vail. For the Church of America is not the 
taste or fancy of an individual, to come and 
go with the life of a generation. It is a part 
of that Catholic Church which was born of 
the Holy Ghost upon the day of Pentecost, 
and which must continue until its children 
gather at the feet of Him who is its Head. 

All this and more is that branch of Christ's 
own Catholic Church concerning which we 
are taught this day to meditate. Catholic 
because it is the Church of history as well 



13 6 ®l)£ <& tirrh 0f America. 

as the Church of the Bible. Neither Rome 
nor Protestantism can look the history of 
the universal, undivided Church in the face 
and abide the verdict. Catholic, because its 
Faith is positive and not a vast negative. 
Catholic, because like the blessed Lord it 
teaches by word, by example, and by symbol- 
ism. Catholic, because it believes Christ 
lived and died, not for any selected number, 
but that He was " the Saviour of the world." 
Catholic, because it is the Church for all 
times, all places, and all men. Catholic, be- 
cause it is lowly in its reverence for any 
human soul, poor or rich. Catholic, because 
its sympathies are broad as the whole earth, 
and its members are the baptized of the 
world. Catholic, because its hope, its pur- 
pose, its final destiny, is as high as heaven. 
Catholic, because it is the Body of Christ, 
the Church which He purchased with His 
own Blood. Catholic, because it is the con- 
tinued life of Christ upon the earth. It there- 
fore not only leads men up to God, but, — 
most reverently let such words be uttered, 
— through its divinely appointed channels, it 
brings God down to man. 



W$t iWcssagc of ftft <Ki)urci) to 
JWen of fflSUaW). 



ftgcrc was a certain ricp man, anb t^ere was a certain 
beggar. iVnfc it came to pass, ttjat tlje beggar bicb, anb 
was carried bp the angels into JVbraljam's bosom : the 
ricp man also bicb, anb was burieb ; anb in Ijell pc lifteb 
up pis epes, being in torments. 

— S. Luke, xvi. 19 to end. 

Charge them robo are rich in this roorlb, that tpep be 
reabp to sine, anb glab to bistributc ; taping up in store 
for tpemselocs a goob founbation against tpe time to come, 
tpat tpep map attain eternal life. — 1 Tim. vi. 17, 18, 19. 

Be merciful after tpp poroer. Jf tpou bast mucp, gioe 
plenteouslp ; if ttjou tjast little, bo ttjp bkigence glablp to 
git»e of tljat little ; for so gatperest tpou tppsclf a goob 
reroarb in tpe bap of neeessitp. — Tobit, iv. 8, 9. 






THE FIRST SUNDA Y AFTER 
TRINITY. 



&i)t Jttessage of ti)e Otimrrf) to 

Then said Jesus unto His disciples, Verily I say 
unto you, That a rich man shall hardly enter into the 
kingdom of heaven. And again I say unto you, It is 
easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, 
than for a rich man to enter into the Kingdom of 
God. — S. Matthew, xix. 23 and 24. 

JO arraign the rich man at the court 
of public opinion is now thought in 
many places the wise and proper 
thing. Thousands of poor souls, headed by 
men from their own ranks, take from their 
starving families almost the last dollar left, 
and spend it in printing flaring posters and 
in hiring public halls, where they pass hours 
breathing bad air and denouncing their 
fellow-men. Before we give any such move- 




140 &t)£ ittessage of tfje (Etjarclj 

ment our final sympathy and cooperation, let 
us seriously consider some unquestioned facts. 
And the first one is, that no sane man, here 
or elsewhere, would decline wealth if offered 
him. There are few men, indeed, who would 
decline to do a little humble begging to-mor- 
row, if for that begging they could secure, 
say, a million of dollars. 

The men who are loudest in their denunci- 
ation of the rich are, as they honestly say, 
" anti-poverty " men. They believe exactly 
as the rich man does, that poverty is not a 
desirable thing. 

Let us keep, then, the fact before our 
minds, that all here and elsewhere would be 
rich if in their power. In the moral and 
spiritual world, heart-desire is the man : what 
a man desires to be, that he is. In desire, 
with scarce an exception, we are all rich men. 
Proceed therefore with the court of public 
censure, if it must be, yet let each man 
remember that before God the arraignment 
is not of the few, but of the many. 

Another fact, which cannot be denied, is 
that the Church has never taught there was 
necessarily either virtue or praise in poverty. 



ic ifcUn of tXteaitl). 141 

Holy Scripture speaks very plainly and sol- 
emnly against the inordinate love of riches, but 
none the less plainly against the sin and dan- 
ger of the idle, the thriftless, and the slothful. 
Poverty self-chosen, like that of our Lord's, 
is something divine, but poverty which is the 
result of folly and inertness is devilish. The 
first and chief moral tramp of the universe 
was and still is the devil. 

It is one thing with Moses to decline the 
luxury and splendor of the palace, but an 
entirely different thing to be a " wicked and 
slothful servant," wrapping one's gift and 
talent and energy in a napkin, and hiding it 
in the ground. It is one thing to say with 
St. Paul, " I have learned in whatsoever state 
I am, therewith to be content," but an 
entirely different thing, upon losing the mere 
effects of this world, to " curse God and die." 
Let no man, therefore, comfort himself with 
the thought that poverty has inherent virtue, 
or that the mere possession of riches is inher- 
ent sin. It is living the wrong kind of life, 
and rebellion against the unavoidable, by the 
poor ; it is living the wrong kind of life, 
the waste of opportunity, and the misuse of 



142 ®l)£ JtUssage of the (Eljttrcb 

wealth, by the rich, — which has darkened the 
face of humanity. 

Let this fact also be recalled, that the antag- 
onism between wealth and poverty, the strug- 
gle between labor and capital, is nothing new: 
it is as old as the human race. Read the 
twenty-fifth chapter of First Samuel, and you 
will find that as long as thirty centuries ago 
a mob would have sacked and destroyed a 
rich man and his property but for the ingen- 
iousness of a pretty and politic woman. 

The men who parade our streets and make 
the wild demand that all property is to be 
equally divided, are arrayed against nothing 
new, but merely against what God has or- 
dained, that some men are to have ten talents, 
others five, and others one. A careful study 
and appreciation of what God has given us 
will, we believe, prove that when all circum- 
stances and surroundings are considered, espe- 
cially those lasting and eternal possibilities which 
God has placed within the grasp of the poorest 
as well as the richest ; when these facts are 
considered, it will be found that each man 
has his just and equal share, 

For while wealth brings personal comforts, 



to Men of toealtt). 143 

unnumbered conveniences, in some places 
social position, and in others civil and polit- 
ical influence ; while it may insure all these 
passing things and many others, it never 
makes pain of body, worry of mind, or sor- 
row of heart any easier to bear: rather is it 
true that the rich man feels pain, sorrow, and 
disappointment more bitterly than his neigh- 
bor, who, from long experience, knows, and 
to some extent at least is hardened to, the 
weariness of want and wretchedness. 

Two men walked along, side by side — one 
a man of great fortune, the other a man of 
comparative poverty. But it was the poor 
man who said he slept well and had much for 
which to be grateful, and it was the rich one, 
looking in at the shop windows, said : " Why 
is there no sleep to sell ? Why do worries 
accumulate till life is one great sorrow?" a 
sorrow which is of this world, a sorrow which 
worketh death. 

Once, it has somewhere been written, there 
gathered in one of the world's great cities one 
of those remarkable companies, actors, clergy- 
men, scientists, statesmen, and the flower of 
literature ; among all these a man of immense 



144 &t)e Message of t\)t (Hjarcl) 

wealth. Looking at him, the statesman said : 
u If I had that man's wealth, the elections 
would be mine ; " looking at him, the anti- 
quarian said : "If I had that man's riches, 
my collection would be the finest in the 
world ; " looking at him, the literary man 
said : " If I had his fortune I would have no 
worries, and I would have leisure enough to 
make my life immortal." 

But how little did these men, with all their 
learning, know of the secrets of the human 
heart ; for a few hours after that celebrated 
reception, the one envied man of that great 
company was lying on the beautiful common, 
dead by his own hand. The quiet stars of 
God looked down upon his handsome face, 
and standing there you heard his history in 
the inspired words of Rome's great prisoner: 
" They that will be rich fall into temptation 
and a snare, and into many foolish and hurtful 
lusts, which drown men in destruction and 
perdition. For the love of money is the root 
of all evil, which while some have coveted 
after, they have been seduced from the faith 
and pierced themselves through with many 



to ftUn of tttedtt). 145 

How many men since the time of Judas 
have stood before the priests of Mammon 
when life was at its end, saying, "I have 
sinned," and the priests of Mammon have 
answered, " What is that to us ? See thou 
to that ; " and, hearing these words, how 
many men have cast down their ill-gotten 
gains on the floor of the world's temple, and, 
going out, have never returned again. 

With the rich man's sorrow is linked spirit- 
ual danger. There, first of all, is the danger 
of discouragement, the danger of getting 
weary in well-doing. When a rich man has 
had his best bread thrown in the streets by 
tramps, when he has had his best motives 
impugned, and his most cherished charities 
cast back into his face a few times, he feels 
very strongly like letting the poor and the 
ignorant take care of themselves. The very 
noblest intentions of wealthy men are often 
entirely misunderstood and misrepresented. 
This cannot be better illustrated than by a 
case in American history. When the war 
with England closed, the United States had 
no money and therefore issued bonds. If the 
credit of the United States is now the highest 



146 ®l)£ ittessage of tl)* (Eljttrcl) 

of any nation in the world, it is also true that 
at that time her credit was by far the lowest 
of any nation in the world. The bonds, of 
course, had no takers, and the outlook for 
American credit was darker than any "Black 
Friday " ever known. It was in such an 
hour that a few loyal men of means, risking 
their fortunes, bought United States bonds 
and saved the nation's credit. It happened, 
as you know, that the land prospered, and 
the men who bought the bonds were rewarded 
with good profits. But the masses never 
thanked these men. Rather did they do 
their best to repudiate the bonds and abuse 
their holders. It was at that time men were 
first called "bloated bondholders," and since 
then many well-intended Americans have 
been similarly treated. If their investment 
succeeded, they were called by unpleasant 
names; if it failed and their fortune was 
lost, they were called " fools." This kind of 
treatment does not encourage a man to be 
patriotic. Nor does such a lack of apprecia- 
tion encourage a man to be charitable. 

Here is a man owning some dilapidated 
tenement-houses, and the press, the clergy 



to itktt of toealtt). 147 

and the politicians say it is very wrong to 
make poor people live in such degradation. 
Under this pressure the man rebuilds his 
tenement-houses, makes them decently habit- 
able, and then he finds the poor will not rent 
them ; he finds the much-pitied poor man 
will spend willingly each week one dollar or 
more for bad beer, but not for better quarters 
for his family ; he finds that the much-pitied 
poor man, rather than be deprived of his Sat- 
urday night carousal, will go and live in other 
tenements like those torn down. This is dis- 
couraging. Then the rich man finds that 
begging has become a profession, and that 
more than half his charities have gone to peo- 
ple who did not deserve them. One morning 
he finds his barns burned down, and his noble 
horses with them, because he refused to pay 
some few hundred men on his railroad more 
than the road was earning. Another day 
comes, and he finds one of his favorite men 
with a broken head, because he declined to 
discharge some competent but non-union 
man. Do you wonder that the rich man 
grows utterly discouraged, or, being entirely 
human like the rest of us, he grows bitter 



148 ftlp itlcssage of tlje Ctjnrcl) 

and retaliates ? And then begins the worst 
of all civil wars, the struggle of labor with 
capital ; then begins what never should be 
forgotten, that we cannot do without each 
other, that capital can do nothing without 
labor, and that labor can do nothing without 
capital ; that, we say, which should never be 
forgotten, that rich man and poor man are 
alike children of one God, of one Eternal 
Father, and that they are, therefore, brothers, 
and that if they would succeed in this world 
and meet again in the world to come, they 
must do unto others as they would have other 
men do unto them. The rich man, then, must 
not only be rich, he must be brave and great, 
or he will weary in well-doing and come 
short of that kingdom which, if he fail to 
gain, he is poor indeed. He must go on 
giving and helping and spending and being 
spent, whether or not men wrong him, the 
masses curse him, and all forsake him. If 
none other knows, God knows, and God will 
reward, and he who has God has all. 

There is another danger in riches. It is 
the danger of making a man an autocrat in 
the wrong place. " In the wrong place," we 



to Men of toeciltt). 149 

say, for the rich man must be an autocrat 
somewhere. He must control in whatever 
be his calling : that is what makes him a rich 
man, his ability to rule absolutely and be 
every inch a king. The moment a rich man 
lets a dozen other people, more or less, run 
his affairs, he will begin to fail. Hundreds 
of people on every side are desirous of telling 
him what he ought to do with his money, and 
he very rightly resents such an interference. 
He says he made his money by his own hard 
work and industry and attention to his own 
affairs. Certainly it should be his privilege to 
say where and to whom he should give it, or 
divide it. This spirit of being master, ruler, 
autocrat, aristocrat, goes on till it not only 
becomes his nature, but it overwhelms him 
and makes him take one step too much, — 
the fatal step of forgetting that in the sight 
of God he is but a servant and a steward, a 
steward that must give an account of what 
has been given him ; given him not to use for 
himself, but for God and for His Church. 

But the ordinary rich man resents such a 
teaching as annoying to his kingly supremacy. 
When the Church comes and asks alms at his 



150 &t)£ Jtkasage of t^c Cljtirrt) 

door, — strange that the Body of Christ should 
do that, — he says : " There, beggar, take the 
crumbs, take what does not hurt me nor mine, 
but do not ask more ; and, beggar, before you 
go, let me say you must conduct yourself as 
I wish. All others who get help from me do 
as I command. If you forget this, beggar, 
and fall to acting regardless of my taste and 
wishes, I will give you no more. Indeed, we 
will part never to meet again." — " Rich man," 
answers the beggar, " desert me, but on the 
peril of your soul's salvation. I am what you 
call me, a ' beggar,' but, as you ought to 
know, a beggar bride, and serve my Lord and 
Him alone. He was once poor and hated 
and dishonored, as I am, that others might be 
rich. When my Lord's servant, Death, leads 
you into His presence, and you are poor, I 
will then, rich man, forget, if it be possible, 
that once you were rich and I beggar at your 
gate." It is the old, old danger of which 
God warned us so solemnly more than thirty 
centuries ago. " When thou hast eaten and 
art full, beware that thou forget not the Lord 
thy God. Lest when thou hast eaten and 
art full, and hast built goodly houses and 



to Men of tOectlti). 151 

dwelt therein ; and when thy herds and thy 
flocks multiply, and thy silver and thy gold is 
multiplied, and all that thou hast is multiplied, 
then thine heart be lifted up and thou forget 
the Lord thy God, and thou say in thine 
heart, ' My power and the might of mine hand 
hath gotten me this wealth,' but thou shalt 
remember the Lord thy God, for it is He 
that giveth the power to get wealth." 

These solemn words foreshadow one of the 
gravest dangers of the rich man's life, — the 
peril of denying what the Church so carefully 
and constantly teaches, that " All things come 
of Thee, O Lord, and of Thine own have we 
given Thee." 

This danger is a most insidious one out of 
the very nature of surrounding circumstances, 
and leads to another peril — the peril of break- 
ing the Eighth Commandment, " Thou shalt 
not steal." " Will a man rob God ? " said the 
world, even startled at such a fearful thought. 
"Yes," said the last prophet before the coming 
of Christ, " ye have robbed Me." — " Wherein 
have we robbed Thee ? " said the world ; and 
God answered, " In tithes and offerings." 
God asked the Jew to give as a debt a tithe 



152 &l)£ ittessage of the Ctjurcb 

(that is, a tenth of his income), and after the 
tithe came the question of free-will offerings. 
The fact which the rich man must meet is, 
whether Christianity is a higher or lower 
form of religion than Judaism. If a lower, 
then he can give less ; but if a higher form of 
religion — and if not a higher form it is nothing 
— then the rich man must give more than the 
Jew, or rob God and His Church. But to 
give as much or more than the tenth of one's 
income as a debt, and after that to make 
peace-offerings and thank-offerings, is too 
high and too severe a standard for the ordi- 
nary rich man. He will spend thousands for 
pleasure, for travel, for ornaments, but very 
seldom will he give the Church of God thou- 
sands. Even when he decides by will what 
is to be done with his wealth when dead and 
gone, how often does he pass by in neglect 
the Sacred Body of Jesus Christ our Lord. 
The requirements of New Testament moral- 
ity are indeed unparalleled in their demands. 
The giving of one-half is commended by our 
Lord, and the giving which is immortalized 
is of that one u who, out of her penury, gave 
all that she had. " Those who gave " out of 



to men of toealtf). 153 

their abundance " so little that it cost them 
no pain nor denial are merely mentioned in 
an unfavorable comparison. 

That the New Testament asks each man 
to bear a cross and follow Christ, must be 
admitted ; and that that cross is no jew- 
elled ornament nor gilded embellishment to 
churchly architecture, cannot be denied. 

The cross of the New Testament, for rich 
or poor, is so large and so heavy, that the 
man who bears it is humbly and reverently 
grateful when the fight is fought, and the 
course is finished, and he is allowed to lay his 
body down at the foot of that cross whose 
arms stretch through time into God's eternity. 
From such a cross the man who was very 
rich turned away very sorrowful, and caused 
our Lord to speak the words with which this 
sermon opened. The man did exactly what 
the ordinary rich man reenacts when the 
Church, which is the continued Life of 
Christ, calls upon him to take up his cross. 
The ordinary rich man will give neither the 
tenth of his time or his influence or his money 
to the cause of the Church. He seldom, if 
ever, comes to an early service or to a week- 



154 ®b* ittessage of tt)e (Eljttrcl) 

day service : he leaves that to the poor and 
to the women and the children. Out of his 
abundance he will give to the wretched and 
the outcast, but he will not spend one day in 
a month standing in their own miserable and 
pitiable homes, studying with his own eyes 
how to ameliorate their unhappy condition. 
With the ordinary rich man, profit, pleasure, 
or personal comfort is first, religion is second. 
But God has never accepted an offering so 
torn and lame and second-rate, and we have 
no proof that God ever will. God must be 
first or He will be nothing. 

With the young ruler the possession and 
accumulation of great riches was the idol of 
his heart. Therefore our Lord, knowing his 
heart as He knows all hearts, said : " Sell that 
thou hast, and come and follow me;" and 
the young man went away very sorrowful, for 
he was very rich. The price was too dear, 
the standard was too high, the cross was 
too heavy. The man made his choice and 
practically rejected Christianity. But any 
one of simplest mind can see why our Lord 
asked of the man such a requirement. God 
did not need his money : it was to prove to 



to Mm of tttectUl). 155 

him and to all men after him that the mere 
moral life, the life which kept the letter of the 
Commandments, might be, and was, entirely 
unwilling to obey and love God in the full, 
fair sense of the words. It was not riches 
nor great possessions which were wrong, but 
the inordinate love of money arising above 
the love of God itself, which was the evil 
piercing through with many sorrows and 
closing the grandest of possibilities in dark- 
ness and death. 

It is to save us from such dangers that the 
Church speaks so solemnly in her gospel to- 
day, to save us from the greatest of all dangers, 
the danger of selfishness and the danger of 
delay. First, the death of selfish contentment, 
the feeling that as long as there is plenty of 
money at hand, all is well, all will triumph. 
Such a disposition and state of mind is dis- 
astrous to man or Church. To such a 
Church, and the words apply to every indi- 
vidual soul, God said from His throne above 
on high : " Because thou art lukewarm, and 
neither hot nor cold, I will cast thee out of 
my mouth. Because thou sayest, I am rich 
and increased with goods, and have need of 



156 &l)£ itUesage of ttje Cljttrct) 

nothing, and knowest not that thou art 
wretched and miserable and poor and blind 
and naked." So indeed forever is he that 
layeth up treasure for himself, but is not rich 
toward God. 

How sharp are the lines in that dramatic 
picture, the man saying to his soul : " Soul, 
thou hast much goods laid up for many 
years : take thine ease, eat, drink, and be 
merry." And God saying : " Thou fool, to 
depend upon what this world has, for to-night 
thy soul shall be required of thee," and then 
shall be revealed the hidden things of dark- 
ness. Such a tragic scene leads us to the 
last great danger of the rich man, the danger 
of delay. 

Few have been the rich men but who have 
purposed that in due time they would be 
better, more generous, more noble, more 
devoutly religious. But with so many the 
time never came, because death came first. 

You can well imagine the surprise and 
shock of such a coming. The man was in his 
private office, examining and signing papers 
of immense value and importance. Strict 
orders had been given not to admit any one, 



to JHen of tXJealtl). 157 

under any circumstances, when, lifting his 
eyes, the rich man was startled to behold by 
his side a presence he had already felt. 

" How came you here without announce- 
ment ? " 

" My coming has been long announced, 
and this meeting is by appointment." 

" Do you come as friend or as foe ? " 

" I am come merely as a servant, to say your 
presence is required by your Master." 

"I have no master," says the rich man, 
" nor do I ever intend to have or obey such a 
person." 

The stranger, though a servant, smiled 
and laid his hand on the paper the rich man 
had been about to sign, and to human eyes 
the white seemed to grow black. 

" Oh, my God ! " said the rich man, " I 
understand now — you are Death. Death, 
I pray you give me a little time to settle my 
affairs." 

" Time is not mine to give," said Death. 
"It belongs, as all else, to my King." And to 
the rich man the room, like the white paper, 
seemed to darken. 

" Grant me a few days to distribute my 



158 £!)£ JiUssage of tlje Cljttrcl) 

wealth, O Death. I will give it away, 
every dollar, wherever the Church of God 
says I must give it. Grant me but a day." 

" It is not mine to grant, even a day." 

" Give me but an hour, then, to pray and 
repent." 

"In such an hour," said Death, "prayer 
would be fear, and repentance but remorse." 
And to the rich man the room grew black 
as night, and in the one last moment on earth 
he thought of the man he had wronged, the 
children he loved, the dog he had kicked, the 
grave of the mother who had taught him to 
pray, and then, alone and poor, he went from 
his office, never to return again. 

" We brought nothing into this world, and 
it is certain we can carry nothing out. In 
the midst of life we are in death ; of whom 
may we seek for succor but of Thee, O Lord, 
who for our sins art justly displeased." 



" His disciples said, Who then can be 
saved ? But Jesus answered and said unto 
them, With God all things are possible." 



to Jflett of toeaitl). 159 

The unparalleled riches and prosperity of 
Joseph never harmed him ; rather did he so 
wisely distribute what God had given him, 
so upright and magnificent of character does 
he stand in the gray dawn of history, that he 
must forever remain the perfect type of our 
Lord and Saviour. 

Through the gorgeous grandeur of a 
heathen palace passed safely one who, un- 
daunted, met the mouths of lions. Of the 
young ruler whose decision caused our Lord 
to utter such fearful words — of him it is 
written that "Jesus loved him." And he of 
Arimathea, who begged of Pilate the Sacred 
Body, who so tenderly wrapped It in fair 
linen and laid It in the new-made tomb, was 
it written, " A rich man." 

Recalling such names of old, such heroic 
examples for encouragement and emulation, 
let us hear to-day the message of the Church 
to men of wealth, and go forth, God helping 
us, to walk henceforth more willingly in the 
footsteps of Him, who, though He was rich, 
yet for our sakes became poor, that we, through 
His poverty, might be rich. 



iWtistc anir <BSit)tgf)t}). 



The day of praise is done, 

The evening shadows fall j 
Yet pass not from us with the sun, 

True Light that lightenest all. 
Around Thy throne on high, 

Where night can never be, 
The white-robed harpers of the sky 

Bring ceaseless songs to Thee. 

For faint our anthems here : 

Too soon of praise we tire. 
But oh ! the strains, how full and clear, 

Of that eternal choir. 
Yet, Lord, to Thy dear will, 

If Thou attune the heart, 
We in Thine angels' music still 

May bear our lower part. 

' Tis Thine each soul to calm, 

Each wayward thought reclaim, 
And make our daily life a psalm 

Of glory to Thy Name. 
Shine Thou within us, then, 

A day that knows no end ; 
Till songs of angels and of men 

In perfect praise shall blend. — Amen. 

— Ellerton. 



TWENTIETH SUNDAY AFTER 
TRINITY. 




Music attir ffl2Eflrsf)ip. 

Speaking to yourselves in psalms and hymns and 
spiritual songs, singing and making melody in your 
heart to the Lord. — Ephes. v. 19. 

ilND when they had sung a hymn, they 
went out unto the Mount of Olives ! 
In all history I know of few sen- 
tences which convey more than this. It is 
the adoption and indorsement by the Christian 
Church of psalmody, and through it of eccle- 
siastical music. Doubtless that hymn was 
sung by all the Christian Church, and it is 
not improbable that that very melody still 
lingers in the form of some old Gregorian 
chant, its identity forever buried and lost. 
What would the Church not give to sing the, 
at once, communion and crucifixion hymn 
its Master and Founder Himself sung ? Sing 
it now, Apostles, as you sit about the Master, 
with the blood of the grape upon your lips. 



164 Jttttsic arib tX)orsl)ip. 

But the day will come, when, amid the flames 
of martyrdom, or the agonies of crucifixion, 
that hymn will rise, consecrated by a deeper 
meaning, and a memory which can never 
perish. . . . And now the hymn has 
paused, but when it comes again upon your 
lips the night will have passed away and you 
will sing it in the blazing glory of the noon- 
day sun." 

So wrote the author of " Studies in Musi- 
cal History." His eloquent words lead to 
the expression of some thoughts upon the 
relation of music to worship. 

Music is the one gratification of the senses 
a man may indulge in to his heart's desire 
without injury to his moral or religious nature. 

No one can express in logical words its 
effect on those who love it. It inspired 
Milton, drove the hell life out of Saul, and 
brought Heaven's high words to Elisha. The 
influence of music is never for aught but 
good. " A kind of inarticulate, unfathom- 
able speech," says Carlyle, "which leads us 
to the edge of the infinite, and for a moment 
lets us gaze into it." 

It is the universal language the destruc- 



iflusk atib tiOorsljip. 165 

tion of Babel did not destroy ; for " heart 
can speak to heart by music, even in a 
foreign land." 

God's nature is very full of music — the 
surge of the sea, the sough of the pines, 
the plaintive winds of Autumn rising into the 
storm of winter, sinking at last into the 
cadence of the Spring song. 

God's people are very fond of music. The 
fisherman at Naples has his boat song to 
which his boat beats time in the beautiful 
sea. In Sicily, you hear always with the 
dying day the evening song of the grape 
gatherers. " The muleteer of Spain," says 
Dr. Cumming, " cares little who is on the 
throne, or who is behind it, if he has his 
morning carol. The Scotch Highlander 
echoes the rocks and gray moors with his 
bonny airs. The English plough-boy gets 
better work done, straighter furrows and 
more of them, for the songs he sings to his 
horses ; and far away on the water streets of 
Venice the gondolier rocks and sings at mid- 
night its serenade. Even rushing America 
whistles itself into more constant activity. 
The wide world, indeed, lightens its labor 



1 66 Jttnsic ttitb toorsliip. 

with music. Blessed is the man who sings 
at his work, said England's great son, and 
blessed is the man whose day of toil is rested 
by its restfulness." 

God's nature and God's world are not only 
full of music, but so also is God's Word. 
From Genesis to Revelation you hear sing- 
ing — not only singing, but every kind of in- 
strument playing. The oratorio of Creation 
has hardly ceased before we are told of 
Jubal, the father of all such as handle the 
harp and the organ, a solemn protest of 
Almighty God, as it were, against the view 
of some people who object to instrumental 
church music. Laban rebuked Jacob for 
stealing away, and not allowing him to cheer 
his departure with songs, with tabret, and 
with harp. On the banks of the Red Sea 
sang Moses and the children of Israel their 
triumphal song of deliverance. Sweet Miriam 
celebrated the same event, only singing alter- 
nately ; for it is written, she answered them, 
they chanting back, " Sing ye to Jehovah, for 
He hath triumphed gloriously." 

The songs of Deborah and Barak, Jeph- 
thah's daughter and her girl friends, were 



ittttsic anb tOorsIjip. 167 

accompanied by music. David and Solomon 
and even stern old Saul gathered every kind 
of sweet sound about them. They celebrated 
their victories by minstrelsy and songs, and 
the poets marked the sadness of captivity by 
the fact that their harps were silent. 

And what shall be said concerning the 
temple music and worship ? Remember the 
temple was God's Church on earth. There 
His people came to worship Him as you 
come here. But have you ever heard how 
this worship was conducted ? The choir had 
in it four thousand singing men and singing 
women. These were divided into twenty- 
four divisions. They entered the temple in 
white-robed processional, the priests having 
cymbals, psalteries, and harps. From one 
division went up the chant, " Praise ye the 
Lord," and from afar came the answer always, 
" For He is good, for His mercy endureth 
forever." They did praise God in those 
days with sound of trumpet, with psalteries 
and harp, with timbrels and pipe, with stringed 
instruments and organs, with loud cymbals 
and high-sounding cymbals — everything that 
had breath praised the Lord. 



1 68 Jtttisic arib tt)0tsl)i:|j. 

Now, into this Temple went in after years, 
to worship, that stern old logician called Saul 
of Tarsus — nay, there went the Son of God 
and kneeled on His knees, worshipped in 
spirit and in truth ; and when that Temple 
had not left one stone upon another, that 
man of Patmos heard from the Temple not 
made with hands, music such as no mortal 
ever heard or the heart of man conceived. 
It was like the voice of many waters, like the 
voice of the great thunder, the voice of harp- 
ers harping with their harps ; and they sang, 
as it were, a new song before the throne. Yes, 
every book in God's Heaven-sent revelation 
is a marvellous musical memoir. The Pen- 
tateuch recitative is a creation of which 
Haydn but faintly imagined. The martial 
music of Joshua is more stirring than the 
Wacht am Rhein of the Fatherland, or the 
Marseillaise of la belle France. Through the 
pastoral of Ruth runs one of life's sweetest 
love-songs. From Kings comes the national 
air " God save the King," and over the royal 
death list they laughed then as now. Le rot 
est mort! Vive le roi. 

The man of Uz, wrapped in his sackcloth 



iHttsic atib ttJoreljip. 169 

and ashes, chanting the world's great Mis- 
erere, stopped to tell his fellow-sufferers of 
when the morning stars sang together, and 
all the sons of God shouted for joy. David 
and Solomon praised God with every instru- 
ment and song their unlimited wealth could 
secure. Isaiah wrote of a Messiah of which 
the great German never dreamed. Ezekie] 
in his night visions conceived nocturnes that 
even Chopin's insanity could not. Certainly 
there are no better carols than those of the 
Evangelists ; and though the Apostle of the 
Gentiles condemned trumpets of uncertain 
sound, his own has a very ringing clearness 
which no man could mistake except a Scotch 
Presbyterian. St. Peter, being a good Church- 
man, of course believed in the Temple wor- 
ship. St. John wrote the Requiem of earth in 
which is heard the Gloria of heaven, " Holy, 
holy, holy, Lord God Almighty, which was, 
and is, and is to come." 

Last of all, how complete and magnificent 
is the music of the Christian year. The 
processional of Advent and the carols of 
Christmas are followed by the versicles and 
antiphones of Saints' Days and the Nunc 



i7° Jtlttsic atib tDorstyip. 

Dimittis of the Circumcision. The arias of 
the Epiphany time are followed by the Mag- 
nificat of the Virgin Mary. The lament of 
Ash Wednesday preludes the Miserere of 
Lent. The De Profundis of Good Friday 
is overwhelmed by the triumph song of 
Easter. The Halel of Ascension softens to 
the largo of Expectation Sunday, and pre- 
pares the soul for the grand harmonies of the 
mighty ^Eolian harp of Whitsunday, and in 
the finale, the roll and crash of the Glorias 
of Trinity echo through the choral of All 
Saints, " and go on forever and ever." 

From these thoughts let us learn, first, 
God's recognition of the law of contrasts. 
It is a law that if a man work all day he 
must sleep at night. Though it be made of 
gold and filled with nectar, if two women are 
carrying a weight, they must change hands if 
they are going far. Though the Word of 
God be inspired, yet it changes its style to 
meet the wants of sinners. The Church 
year itself changes the style and character 
of its services to meet the needs of the 
human heart. Though music be very good, 
it must change in its rendering or lose in its 



ittusic atib tiOorstjip. 171 

power. The men who formed the great 
Temple service knew this law and did not fly 
in its face. God was praised with many 
voices or by a single voice. The delicate 
solo was lost in the massive chorus, or in the 
hush following the glorias of thousands came 
the still small voice of man or woman in 
song of praise or prayer. And the true 
church choir will have in it the elements 
capable of producing every kind of musical 
effect that is good — the solo, the duet, the 
quartette, the quintette, the octette, the chorus 
and double chorus led by orchestra, by organ, 
by harp and every musical auxiliary that is 
right and helpful. 

Let us also learn that God's worship should 
have in it any variation that makes it beauti- 
ful. It does not matter whether people call 
it " High Church " or " Low Church " or 
" like the Roman Catholics ; " it does not 
matter whether it is new or old ; it does not 
matter whether it differs in every respect 
from the customs of our fathers : if it is in 
harmony with God's Word, with the customs 
of His Church, with the laws of the human 
heart unprejudiced, then let us have it if it is 



17 2 Jttneic emir toorstjij). 

right. For one hundred years the services 
of the American Church have been as an 
organist playing with three stops — the Morn- 
ing Prayer, the Litany, and the Ante-Commu- 
nion service. The time has come when every 
stop should be brought into play, and by a 
magnificent variety of services we be allowed 
to hear the grandeur of the full organ. 

Let us to-day also learn that the musical 
part of worship is one of the most essential 
parts. Men say — often very honestly — that 
they come to Church to hear the sermon ; 
but, if a man come for that purpose only, he 
makes a great mistake. The Church on earth 
is where God has promised to meet His peo- 
ple. It is important that he come, not simply 
to hear His Word, but to praise Him for His 
goodness, and to ask Him for more strength 
to fight the battle of the coming days. Six 
days there are when most men must move 
side by side with selfishness and hollowness, 
cheek by jowl with the world, the flesh, and 
the Devil. God pity the man, then, who 
does not stop one day in seven to worship 
some other god than the mere money of this 
world and the mere fame of the passing day. 



Jfltosic cmb tttorsbip. 173 

The radical weakness of parts of the Church 
and of all Protestantism is its wants of wor- 
ship. It is kind and encouraging for a man 
to say he likes to hear the sermon ; but the 
sermon is a very small part of the service, and 
it is not half so important that that should be 
good as that the praises to God should be 
true and beautiful. 

Let it, too, be remembered that in Paradise 
and in Heaven there will be no sermons, only 
worship. Might it not be well while on earth 
to learn how to take part in and enjoy wor- 
ship ? If the worship is a poor sort of thing, 
suppose we all try by our influence and our 
means to make it better, more profitable, and 
more beautiful. 

And, as the evening shadows fall, let us 
remember that there is no music so sweet, 
so sad, so grand, as may be these human lives 
of ours ; no music so varied as the heart's 
experience. It passes from the allegro of 
joy to the adagio of sorrow. Life, indeed, 
may be an extravaganza played vivicessimo, 
or a symphony played con gravita. Life may 
be a sinful discord or a heavenly harmony. 
Whatever it is, let us remember the finale. 



174 Music anh tiOox&\)ip. 

After Schubert's Hobby Horse comes his 
Earl King. After the processional comes 
the recessional, after the cradle lullaby and 
the warrior's triumph song comes the funeral 
march ; but only those who know the mean- 
ing of the Cross can sing a hymn and pass 
calmly up to Calvary and the Mount of God's 
Ascension. 



gill j5amte' Bag- 



A noble army, men and boys, 

The matron and the maid. 
Around the Saviour's throne rejoice, 

In robes of light arrayed. 
They climbed the steep ascent of heaven 

Through peril, toil, and pain : 
O God, to us may grace be given 

To follow in their train ! 

— Bishop Heber. 

For all the saints, who from their labors rest, 
Who Thee by faith before the world confess 'd, 
Thy name, Jesu, be forever blessed. Alleluia. 

— Bishop How. 



ail joints' Bag, 



A great multitude which no man could number. 

— Rev. vii. 9. 

|[PjJ£"M]HE festival of Easter, in the year 
KSSg|fl| of our Lord 1886, will fall upon 
Ww9m i the twenty-fifth day of April. Such 
an event has not happened within the pres- 
ent century, nor will it again come to pass 
until the year of our Lord 1943. The earliest 
day upon which Easter can fall (March 
22) will not occur, in fact, until the year 
a.d. 2000. Not as remarkable as either of 
these coming occurrences, yet one worthy 
of special mention, is the coincidence, that 
in this year the beautiful festival of All 
Saints falls upon and coincides with that day 
of the week which commemorates the Resur- 
rection. By force of circumstances, there- 
fore, we celebrate All Saints' with a congre- 
gation of respectable size. Had this most 
beautiful festival fallen, as so often, upon a 



178 &ll Saints* Bay. 

week day, more than three-quarters of this 
present congregation would have been absent, 
for to worship God on Sunday, and not on a 
week day, has become a fashionable custom 
now ; and to observe and carefully follow the 
fashion of the times is a usage few ignore, 
whether they dress in homespun or in broad- 
cloth, whether their gown is made of cotton 
or of satin, and the fashion of the present 
time, let it be repeated, is to worship God on 
Sunday, and to neglect and ignore His wor- 
ship on all other days, be they saints' days or 
week days. Once the Church had many 
festivals, but the world complained it had not 
time enough to buy and to sell, to bargain 
and to grind ; therefore the Church (that 
the world might have no excuse) com- 
bined many days in one and called it All 
Saints'. 

Once the doors of the Church were ever 
open, protected from desecration by the 
mighty power of public opinion. Now, unless 
some one watches by day and night, it cannot 
be, for the world stands ready to rob God's 
temple and to profane His sanctuary. All 
this because there exists no public opinion to 



&U Saints' JBajL 179 

drown the Church thief in the nearest water, 
as the people did of old. 

Once the Church thought not merely of 
the selfish living, but in her marvellous 
prayers spoke ever of the sacred dead. The 
liturgies of St. James, St. Mark, St. Peter, St. 
John, and all other primitive liturgies, have, 
in each and all, prayers for the rest and peace 
of the departed. To omit such prayers was 
never thought of till the mutilated Prayer 
Book of 1552. Calvinism was responsible for 
that change, as it still is for much of the 
world's sorrow and unbelief. The Prayer 
Book of 1662 restored the ancient custom, 
and like our own Prayer Book keeps in the 
Church's thought the memory of the holy 
dead ; but neither Burial nor Communion 
Office has been able to give back the lost faith 
of bygone ages. Bitter and great, therefore, 
has been the punishment. First the Church 
has lost in worldly power, success, and afflu- 
ence. No society of any kind can thrive 
without congregated meetings from time' to 
time, meetings well attended by its members, 
and warmed by the enthusiasm of earnestness. 
But the world says it is too busy to leave the 



180 &U Saints 1 Ela^. 

temporal and meditate even for a few mo- 
ments upon the eternal ; "neither the beggar 
in the morning nor the prince at evening 
kneels any longer in the quiet church and 
prays for her peace and prosperity." It is 
not the fashion now, and tramp and king are 
alike still careful upon some points of eti- 
quette. Human orders and the most de- 
graded of politics can master processions of 
believers and followers unto the thousands, 
but the Church could not, upon the call of 
her clergy, master her tens to march beneath 
the Cross and respect the new-made dead. 
We would be too busy and engrossed, and 
would answer, " I pray thee have me ex- 
cused." Besides, nine men out of ten would 
add, it is not the custom now, and therefore 
it might be highly inexpedient. But mark 
it, the Church which visited the sick, fed 
the hungry, clothed the naked ; the Church 
which builded till its architecture settled into 
frozen and imperishable music ; the Church 
which rose in her Divine might and con- 
quered the world, — was a Church true on the 
week day to her Leader, and not ashamed 
on the saint day of her colors. 



&ll Saints 1 JDarj. 



In one other, even in a more awful way, 
has the selfishness and cupidity of the world 
closed the doors of the Church. Selfishness 
has struck from the children of men most of 
their faith in the unseen. Christmas and 
Easter are to some extent matters of history, 
but All Saints' is the annunciation of the invis- 
ible, yet of the most real, if any comparison 
be allowed. The consciousness of our exist- 
ence, for instance, is a matter of intuition; 
it is something unseen and beyond proof, 
yet one of the most certain realities of life. 
That within us which makes us fear to mur- 
der, and which delights in the generous and 
noble action ; that spiritual existence which 
exists, asleep or awake, which is not weak- 
ened by physical sickness, and which is not 
stilled by coming death, — how much more real 
is that existence than all else seen ! Selfish- 
ness and unbelief have come to doubt the very 
existence of that spirit and its Divine thought, 
and bitter and great has been the penalty. 
The departed are no longer thought of as at 
rest and peace in the bosom of Eternal Love. 
Rather they call the departed the dead, and 
make them ghosts to scare some sad-faced 



1 82 &U Saints' HDajj. 

child. Communion with them is at an end ; 
the hand of Fate has laid fingers on eyes and 
ears and mouth, saying in the dark silence, 
u Life is ended and Love is lost in irrevoca- 
ble death." 

But the truths of Scripture and history 
are facts, whether or not men believe them. 
The Divinity of Christ and the Resurrection 
of the Body are not dreams, and the Com- 
munion of Saints and the Immortality of the 
Soul are verities sweeping through the blue 
of heaven by the shining stars up to the 
white throne of God. Our eyes may be too 
blurred with earthenness to behold the sight, 
but in the solemn service which is to follow 
there by the side of the living will be the 
sacred dead, the holy angels, and the Eter- 
nal God. 

We live and act often as if the Church of 
God was that weak and faltering band of 
men the eye of flesh can see, that and that 
alone. But when we pray for the "whole 
Church " it is not for the few and the weary 
of these times, but for that great multitude 
of all nations, and kindreds, and people, and 
tongues, so vast even in St. John's time that 



2UI Saints ' fOag. 183 

no man could number them. It is to this 
unnumbered host that the Church of Christ 
brings us on All Saints', not simply to those 
living friends and acquaintances who, like 
ourselves, are very unsaint-like. And this 
suggests the question, Who and what were the 
saints ? 

There is an idea, for instance, that a saint 
is necessarily one who lives in a monastery 
isolated from the world, who feeds his soul 
by starving and pinching his body. There 
may have been such saints— history shows 
that behind the bars of the cloister God has 
seen such ; but such saints are not the kind 
the world most needs to-day. We need 
saints who will lighten the gloom of the sick- 
room, who will walk our streets and show 
the sneering crowds that there are larger 
things than laughter and the crackling of 
sticks under the pot of belittling ribaldry. 
The saint who will most hasten God's cause 
will not, in this day, be found lying on a 
stone floor, nor praying in a mouldering cell, 
but in the home where the woman bears in 
patience sickness, trial, and sorrow, and in 
the public hall, on the open street, and in the 



1 84 &ll 0011X10' EDag. 

peopled city where the man bears witness by 
word and life that he is striving to be true to 
himself and the Forever of God whence he 
is hurrying. In Jewish times they stoned 
such men ; in old English times they burned 
them ; in these times they may use different 
methods, but accomplish the same result. 
The mob which stoned, and the mob which 
burned, and the mob which tells us to-day it is 
weak and effeminate to be earnestly religious, 
have in them the same elements ; they are 
made up of ignorance and conceit, mental 
weakness and moral depravity. 

The saint, too, is, and has always been, a 
soul made up of elements which never change, 
— a strong great man or woman facing with 
calm and steady nerve, with uplifted eye, 
with iron will, with unbreakable purpose, the 
fierce conflict ever existing between right 
and wrong, between the world and Almighty 
God. 

It is a fact ever to instruct and encourage, 
that the saints were not men of perfect char- 
acter. A man's character is something help- 
ful in the way of emulation, if it is not too 
high, too far beyond the possibility of attain- 



&U Saints' Atop. 185 

ment, if it seems natural and not supernatu- 
ral. The saints of whom we know anything 
seem to have been burdened with a very good 
share of human weakness, and to have felt 
the burden of the same deeply. St. Paul is 
generally ranked among the greatest and 
strongest of the apostolic college, but accord- 
ing to his own testimony he was the least of 
the apostles, and the chief of sinners, and 
we cannot afford to question the sincerity or 
truthfulness of his statement. The apostle 
upon whom a vast part of the Universal 
Church rests as upon a " rock " was a man 
who denied his Lord, and who, even after 
his repentance, was rebuked for doctrinal 
error. These apostolic weaknesses were not 
confined to men of that early day, they show 
themselves in men of every age. St. Augus- 
tine in his efforts to combat error became the 
father of Calvinism, and St. Francis of Assisi 
had a violent, uncontrolled temper, and wil- 
fully encouraged ignorance. You may search 
long and carefully the roll of honor in the 
eleventh chapter of Hebrews, or in the cal- 
endar of the Church, but you will search in 
vain in all these records for a perfect man. 



1 86 &U Saints' mag. 

There was but one perfect Life, and that was 
Divine as well as human. If, therefore, the 
saint was not a perfect man, what was he ? 

To begin with, he was a man upon whom 
the Church could rely for support, support 
of all kinds, physical, temporal, and spiritual. 
When he said he renounced the devil and 
all his works, he meant exactly what he said. 
In the years after his baptism the devil and 
his angels sometimes beat him, bruised his 
body, and left a dark shadow on his heart, 
but none the less did the man renounce and 
hate the devil and all evil. The saint was 
a man who gave for the Church anything he 
had to give if the Church needed it, — time, 
money, or life itself. In other words, with 
the saint the Church was first and the world 
second. Whether the clouds were dark or 
bright, whether religion was popular or dis- 
graceful, whether the times were hard or 
easy, the saint made God and His religion 
the first thought of his heart ; the world and 
all that relates to it he made his second 
thought. 

To end with, the saint was a man who 
had made up his mind, God helping him, to 



&U Saints' JDan. 187 

do right at any cost. Often he failed, as day 
by day passed, to keep his resolve ; but that 
was the resolve with which he began and 
ended each day, to be true even at the price 
of life. 

That is the struggle of life for each one, — 
to fairly, honestly, and entirely, not with men 
nor with angels and archangels, but with our- 
selves to fairly, honestly, and entirely resolve 
each day to choose the right at any cost. 
The crisis is not when the pleasures of exist- 
ence kiss the cheek, and the passions of life 
hasten the heart-beats, but rather is the bat- 
tle decided in the still, quiet moments before 
spirit and body have grappled in the struggle 
which ends in life or death. Ask any soldier 
who has nobly fought, and he will tell you 
that the awful moment is not when the smoke 
of battle is lighted by the blood of human 
arteries, and chain-shot cut swathes through 
human flesh : rather in that moment when 
the battle has become hand to hand, sword 
to sword, in that moment when locked in each 
other's arms the struggle is settled knife to 
knife, in that moment men have been known 
to laugh. The struggle is not when blood 



&ll Saints 1 JBag. 



and carnage encardine the green earth and 
the white-faced body ; but in that moment or 
in that hour which precedes the battle, then 
is the awful fear and the deciding conflict. 
In that hour when the man thinks of wife 
and little one so far away, of home and 
love, maybe no more for him on earth, of 
fame and ambition, never maybe now to be 
attained, of the vast forever and its unlimit- 
able way, — that is the moment which pales the 
face and makes sick the heart of the bravest. 

And that is the moment now upon us, day 
by day upon us till life be done, and the 
voice from out the ages is : "If thy hand 
offend thee, cut it off ; if thy eye offend 
thee, pluck it out." Sweetly call the pleasures 
of life, siren-like the passions of life, madly 
the ambition of life, desperately and inces- 
santly the love of life, be it what it will. 

They call us, and so often, from the narrow 
way which leadeth up to God into the broad 
and beaten way which leadeth to destruction. 
If it is not in your heart and mine to-day to 
leave the evil and choose the good, then God 
have mercy upon us, for no other can have 
mercy. But if the love of Christ and His 



&U Saints' HJag. 189 

Body the Church be more than pleasure, 
more than passion, and even more than love 
itself, then in the Sacred Feast to which all 
may come that wish, we shall kneel to-day 
not alone with the living, but with the Sacred 
Dead, with the glorious company of the apos- 
tles, with the goodly fellowship of the proph- 
ets, with the white-robed army of martyrs, 
with every noble soul of every age, with every 
faithful life which has been faithful unto 
death. 



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